Thanks to devoted designers and an Ontario museum, C&C’s legacy is preserved.
Issue 139: July/Aug 2021
Soon after George Cuthbertson parted ways with C&C Yachts in 1981, he donated the majority of his Cuthbertson & Cassian and early C&C drawing files to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston, Ontario. These drawings spanned George’s design career from the 1950s to 1973, the year he assumed the presidency of C&C Yachts and handed design responsibilities to Rob Ball. All the C&C design drawings completed after 1973 remained the property of C&C Yachts. This is where Tim Jackett comes in.
Tim Jackett (standing) confers with George Cuthbertson after delivering 23 years of drawings for the C&C Yachts Collection at the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston, Ontario.
A great admirer of George and C&C Yachts, Tim credits the arrival of the C&C custom 40-footer Blackbird in Cleveland as one of his inspirations to becoming a yacht designer. He started his design career with Tartan Marine, where ultimately he rose to president as well as chief designer.
It should come as little surprise, then, when Tartan Marine (through its holding company Fairport Marine) in 1997 purchased the assets of C&C Yachts and moved the remaining tooling and all the drawing files to Ohio. Tim was keen to build on the well-established performance and quality reputation of C&C to launch a new generation of boats to his own design. Over the next several years, these new C&Cs would include the C&C 99, 101, 110, 115, and 121, all of which proved successful.
But what was Tim to do with 23 years of C&C drawings from 1973 to 1996? He decided to donate them to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston to complete the C&C Collection begun by George Cuthbertson. Stuffing his car with as many rolls of drawings as he could squeeze in—about 100—Tim drove from Ohio to George’s home in Lowville, Ontario. There, he met with George, myself, and Maurice Smith, then the museum’s curator emeritus. After the handover of drawings, we all spent a pleasant afternoon reminiscing about C&C.
But the story wasn’t over yet. Tim felt there still might be more rolls of drawings at Tartan Marine that he may have overlooked. He agreed that I could drop by and see what we might find.
After a couple of hours of exploring through the accumulated dust of an active boat shop, we found about 40 more rolls of drawings. These included the designs for the Mega 30, C&C 27 Mk I, II, and III, the Canada’s Cup winner Evergreen, the Landfall 39 and 42, and many other classic C&Cs.
About half of those have been catalogued and delivered to the museum to join Tim’s original donation, and I’m in the process of cataloguing the others, starting with the Landfall 35. The museum hopes that sometime in the future, Tim’s own C&C drawings will be added to this collection.
So, while I’ve always considered Tim Jackett a good friend, I also applaud his extraordinary contribution to preserving the design legacy of a remarkable company responsible for the building of so many of our good old boats.
For more about the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston: www.marmuseum.ca/.
Good Old Boat Technical Editor Rob Mazza is a mechanical engineer and naval architect. He began his career in the 1960s as a yacht designer with C&C Yachts and Mark Ellis Design in Canada, and later with Hunter Marine in the U.S. He also worked in sales and marketing of structural cores and bonding compounds with ATC Chemicals in Ontario, and Baltek in New Jersey.
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