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Today Chris-Craft is based in Sarasota, Florida, and builds powerboats with lines reminiscent of the Smith family tradition. The latest addition is the 27 Launch, celebrating the shipyard’s 150th anniversary.
The story begins more than 150 years ago, a century from the time the first model produced by the Chris Smith & Sons Boat Co., as it was called at the time, was introduced under the name Chris-Craft. It was a 26-footer and was launched in May 1924. As in all successful ventures, the start was almost accidental, and, in truth, a great deal of credit must be given to the ducks.
Carlo Riva has always said that for him the Chris Craft brand has been a strong source of inspiration. Some of the Engineer’s boats,
including the iconic Aquarama
, mounted General Motors engines marinized by Chris Craft.
No, we have not gone crazy. The history of the Chris-Craft brand began the moment Christopher Columbus Smith dropped out of school at the age of 14 to devote himself and his older brother Henry to building boats for duck hunting, starting in the small town of Algonac, Michigan, overlooking the St. Clair River where they both lived.
What made the difference was the natural talent and wealth of experience the Smith brothers had acquired both as hunters and as builders of boats created specifically for this business. In 1874, production of hulls was started that met with the interest and approval of an increasingly large and affluent clientele living in nearby Detroit.
Here is the other piece that proved to be of fundamental importance in decreeing Chris Craft’s success. The nascent automobile industry, which had its beating heart in Detroit, represented for Chris and Henry Smith a source of inspiration and a reference to introduce a new production model on the nautical scene as well. Indeed, the shipyard was the first to adopt a production logic that, as early as the 1920s, could be called industrial.
Again, nothing was accidental. It all stemmed from the need to meet a demand that had now definitely taken off. Not only that. It was precisely the proximity to Detroit that allowed them to benefit from the first internal combustion engines destined for the automobile industry. Christopher Smith immediately sensed its potential for his boats.
Adding further luster and visibility to these hulls is Smith’s own role as designer of winning boats in the Gold Cup Races, the world’s oldest and most prestigious powerboat competition.
Performance, research, innovation, elegance, and design were the ingredients that within a short period of time led Chris-Craft to become a benchmark for boating.
So much so that it won the attention of international jet setters and tycoons among whom are the names of Vincent Astor, Roger Firestone, Thomas Edison, Walter P. Chrysler or movie stars such as Charlie Chaplin or U.S. presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
A notoriety that over time has been revived by Chris-Craft’s appearances on the big screen in such films as “On Golden Lake” with Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda; “Indiana Jones, the Last Crusade” with Harrison Ford, not to mention “Mission Impossible III” and the television series “Baywatch” and “Miami Vice.”
There are also Chris Craft models that have become “stars,” such as the Cadet. The success recorded by this model introduced in 1927 consecrated the shipyard on the international nautical scene. In this 150-year course in addition to the Cadet, there is also room for other equally important models such as the Barrell Back, introduced in the late 1930s and 1940s, which rose to the headlines for its stern with its characteristic rounded shape. Not to mention the legendary Cobra, which featured a futuristic design for the time (1950s) with a fin in the stern section.
In 1964 came the Commander, the first fiberglass model. Today Chris-Craft perpetuates this tradition with a range that consists of five product lines, Launch, Launch GT, Catalina, Calypso and Sportster.
On the 150th anniversary, to celebrate, came an edition of Launch 27 that celebrates with unique colors and finishes a special history that is destined to continue.
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