Lewmar

From Havant in 1946 to a fourth owner in 2019

Lewmar was founded in 1946 in Havant, originally making Tufnol dinghy fittings, and the company name is a portmanteau of its founders, Len Lewry and Leslie Marsh. John Burton bought the company in 1967 and ran it for roughly twenty years, growing it into a world leader in yacht equipment. Lewmar's own history credits it with supplying winch packages to America's Cup yachts from the 1960s onward, including both finalists in 1983, Australia II and Liberty, though this specific claim traces to Lewmar's own materials rather than an independently confirmed third-party source and should be read as company-stated history. Two of Lewmar's products won the marine industry's DAME innovation award, the Ocean Block in 1993 and the OneTouch winch handle in 2006.

Ownership has changed four times since 2007. The private equity firm 3i held Lewmar until December 2007, when Shackleton Ventures acquired a significant interest as part of a portfolio purchase; at that point Lewmar was losing money, over GBP 10 million between 2006 and 2008 with GBP 14 million of net debt. Peter Tierney joined as Chairman and CEO in 2008 to lead a turnaround, and by 2010 the company was consistently profitable. Bestport invested alongside Shackleton in April 2014 as growth capital, partly to fund Lewmar's move into glass hatches. In August 2019, Lewmar Marine Limited was sold to Lippert Components, a subsidiary of the US-listed LCI Industries, in a deal reported at roughly GBP 36 million; at the point of sale, FY2018 figures showed EBITDA over GBP 5 million on revenue of about GBP 56 million, and Bestport's exit was reported as a 6.1x return. Lewmar now trades under the Lippert corporate umbrella, with Havant still its only confirmed dedicated manufacturing site, now listed on Lippert's own facility register.

Winches, windlasses, hatches: how the range breaks down

The winch range runs from the long-standing Ocean Series, single-speed and two-speed, chromed bronze or anodised aluminium, through the current EVO Series launched in 2010. Manual winches convert to electric from around size 40 through size 65, and electric or hydraulic operation is available from size 40 up to size 80; the ELS, Electric Load Sensing, control box lets a winch run to its full safe working load without manual load limiting, and an EVO Hydraulic Self-Tailing Winch with full manual override is marketed specifically at superyacht and offshore-race sail-handling loads. A representative electric unit, the Ocean E-Series size 40, runs on 12V with a below-deck motor and a 1,750 lb safe working load.

Windlasses split into the CPX and V-Series vertical lines, built on a common worm-wheel gearbox architecture for boats of roughly 33 to 50 ft, and the Pro-Series and H-Series horizontal lines for 20 to 47 ft boats, the H3 rated to about 2,000 lbs maximum pull and singled out by Practical Sailor as a rode warrior for combination-rode users. Hatches and portlights are built around the Ocean Series, a bonded acrylic lens with external hinges in 10mm or 12mm thickness, standard equipment on thousands of offshore boats, alongside the Atlantic portlight in anodised aluminium. Lewmar also sells mechanical and hydraulic steering systems under the Constellation and Mamba names, marketed as more than fifty years in that business, and hydraulic pumps for steering, windlasses and trim controls as a separate product family.

Independent testing puts Lewmar first on efficiency. The same testing found three separate, and separately documented, ways for it to fail.

What a winch or windlass costs, new and serviced

Retail prices at named US retailers: a Lewmar Ocean 14 aluminium self-tailer runs USD 659.99, an Ocean 16 chrome self-tailer USD 1,449.99, an EVO 45 two-speed self-tailer USD 3,179.99 and an EVO 50 two-speed self-tailer USD 4,249.99; a 45-size electric self-tailing winch in chromed bronze runs USD 5,709.99. For windlasses, Practical Sailor's own bench test priced the Lewmar Sprint 400 at USD 565, the Sprint 600 at USD 739 and the Horizon 600 at USD 640, against a Maxwell Freedom 500 at about USD 810 and a Muir Compact 600 at USD 1,110 in the same test. The V3, rated for boats of 40 to 50 ft, lists around USD 3,000 for the gypsy and drum unit alone, before mounting hardware, chainpipe, deck wiring and control wiring are added; one Hull Truth forum cost breakdown for a lighter-duty unit implied installation labor running roughly equal to the unit price itself, an anecdotal but illustrative multiplier.

Lewmar's own service literature and independent cruising guides converge on an annual strip-clean-and-regrease as the standard recommendation, though the correct interval is genuinely usage-dependent: some heavy-use owners service every twelve weeks and others report three-year intervals working fine. Grease guidance is specific and easy to get wrong: a quality 130AA-type grease belongs on gears and races, explicitly not on the pawls or their springs, which should stay dry or lightly oiled, since sticking pawls are a real safety hazard that lets the drum spin back under load. A genuine Lewmar Winch Maintenance Kit, grease, winch oil, ten pawl springs, brush and service guide, retails at about GBP 69, and a thorough per-winch service is estimated at a couple of hours, meaning a four to eight winch sailing yacht implies a full day or more of yard labor for one complete round.

Against Harken, Andersen, Maxwell and Muir

At comparable sizes, a Harken 44 two-speed aluminium self-tailer lists around USD 1,353 against a similar Lewmar Ocean self-tailer at roughly USD 1,004, with published power-ratio figures nearly identical between the two brands at both size 40 and size 50, meaning the real difference is price and drum feel rather than raw pulling power. Practical Sailor's own six-brand winch test found Lewmar ranked first in efficiency, a hair ahead of Andersen, but still awarded overall best-buy honors to Andersen because of its superior stainless drum quality and finish, with the review's own summary noting there is almost no gap between the two and that Lewmar would be a toss-up with Andersen if it had a drum as good.

On windlasses, Maxwell's Freedom 500 won Practical Sailor's overall test on speed, price and warranty, at 700 lbs rope pull and 112 fpm no-load retrieval for about USD 810 with a 3-year warranty, while the Lewmar Horizon 600 was named the top-performing horizontal windlass in the same test at 950 lbs chain pull for about USD 640, pulling harder for less money even though Maxwell took the overall crown on retrieval speed. The Lewmar V3 pulled to 1,600 lbs before clutch slip in Practical Sailor's testing, described in that piece as higher than any other windlass tested, a genuine hard-number edge over both Maxwell and Muir. Muir's Compact 600 was the single most expensive unit in the same test at USD 1,110 yet underperformed both cheaper Lewmar and Maxwell units on pull force, with the review's own verdict that its performance did not support its premium price.

What breaks, and what owners actually say

SailNet Community and Sailing Anarchy threads on Lewmar's D1 and D2 rope clutches describe the return springs as a really bad design that loses tension when even slightly dirty and can rotate off its mounting, a problem widely enough recognised that Lewmar issued a revised spring, with owners also field-retrofitting by bending the spring arm themselves. A separate Sailboat Owners Forums thread, titled as a warning to inspect Ocean Series self-tailing winches, describes pawl pockets worn or stretched enough that springs jam between the bronze gear and the pawl, so both pawls fail to spring back and the winch can no longer stop the drum spinning backwards under load, reported even on relatively new, routinely maintained units. A detailed YBW Forum teardown account of a Lewmar Ocean windlass gearbox found a hardened, failed shaft seal that had not leaked visibly but let in enough moisture over a season to pit the bearings, concluding that by the time the gearbox sounds rough, the seal kit alone will not fix it.

Set against those specific, recurring complaints, independent forum threads on SailNet and Sailing Anarchy consistently credit Lewmar with strong spare-parts availability and ease of disassembly, even for many older models, a genuine practical advantage independent of the manufacturer's own claims. A Trawler Forum thread has one owner reporting eight years of stellar results from a Lewmar 1000 Pro-Series windlass with good factory support when parts wore out, and a Cruisers Forum owner reported four to five hundred anchoring uses since 2004 with only a loose contact in the hand control as a fault. Some posters on Sailing Anarchy and SailNet separately describe current-generation Lewmar hardware as cheap or underbuilt relative to Harken and raise unconfirmed concerns about metal quality on blocks and fittings; these read as forum opinion rather than measured test data and should be weighed as such, distinct from the specific, repeatable failure modes documented above.

لمين هو: Owners specifying or replacing winches, windlasses or hatches on a 21 to 33 m sailing or motor yacht who want independently verified pulling power at a competitive price, and who will budget for the annual service Lewmar's own literature calls for rather than treat the hardware as fit and forget.