Nordhavn

From a Dana Point brokerage to the first Nordhavn

Nordhavn traces back to 1974, when Jim Leishman, Dan Streech and Joe Meglen formed a small yacht brokerage in Dana Point, California, importing sailboats from Taiwan under the name Pacific Asian Enterprises. Through the late 1970s and into the 1980s PAE built its own line of Al Mason-designed cruising sailboats at the Ta Shing yard in Taiwan, more than 200 hulls across the Mason 43 and its later variants. That relationship with Ta Shing, now well past its fortieth year, is still building Nordhavns today.

The shift to power came from Jeff Leishman, Jim's younger brother, who finished a naval architecture degree in 1987 and drew a 46-foot full-displacement motor yacht inspired directly by Robert Beebe's book Voyaging Under Power. The trade called it a tugboat. Hull number one of the Nordhavn 46 launched in early 1989, built not by Ta Shing, which had turned the design down, but by a newly formed yard in Taipei called South Coast Marine. That boat is the reason the brand exists.

Two Asian yards, one American standard

Every Nordhavn is still built the same way PAE set up in 1989: engineered and specified in Dana Point, built under PAE supervision at yards in Taiwan and China and sold factory-direct with no dealer network standing between the buyer and the builder. Ta Shing, in Taiwan, builds the larger raised pilothouse models including the N62, N64, N68 and N72/76. South Coast Marine, which opened a 21-acre second factory in Xiamen, China in 2007 and 2008 to keep pace with demand, builds the smaller and mid-size line including the N40, N43, N47, N55 and N86.

That China-built reality surprises some first-time buyers who expect a Dana Point address to mean a Dana Point production line, and it shows up occasionally as skepticism on owner forums. In practice the finished boats are inspected and warrantied by PAE, sold and project-managed by PAE staff rather than independent dealers, and the yards themselves have been building Nordhavns for three and four decades, long enough that surveyors, insurers and owners treat the construction quality as a known quantity rather than an open question.

Proof gathered at sea, not in a brochure

Nordhavn's real marketing has always been mileage. A Nordhavn 40 named simply Nordhavn became the smallest production power vessel to circumnavigate the globe, leaving Dana Point in November 2001 and returning in June 2002 after roughly 24,000 nautical miles and 170 days at sea. In 2004 Jim Leishman led the Nordhavn Atlantic Rally, eighteen trawlers, most of them Nordhavns, from Fort Lauderdale to Gibraltar by way of Bermuda and the Azores, a rally that won Motor Boat and Yachting's Best of the Year award and became the model for the owner rallies the brand still runs.

PAE's own count, not independently audited but consistent with the fleet history visible on owner blogs and brokerage listings, puts more Nordhavn circumnavigations and ocean crossings on the water than every other motor yacht builder combined. Whatever the exact tally, the pattern is real: this is a brand whose reputation was built by owners who actually crossed the oceans the boats were designed for, then wrote and filmed about it in detail, from Ken and Roberta Williams' Crossing an Ocean Under Power to the Nordhavn Owners Group's own rally archives.

A large, close-knit fleet rather than a large company

By 2020 PAE had delivered around 850 boats across its Mason and Nordhavn lines, with close to 500 Nordhavns active in the water and a current model range running from the 41-foot N41 up to the 120-foot N120. The company stayed debt-free through both the 1990 luxury tax collapse and the 2008 to 2011 financial crisis, trimming production rather than borrowing, and the same three founders were still running it as of its fortieth anniversary in 2018.

For an owner that translates into a genuinely small world: a factory that still answers the phone the way it did thirty years ago, a Nordhavn Owners Group and a distance pennant program that track real sea miles and a resale market where surveyors, brokers and insurers already know the boats. It is the opposite of a mass-production motor yacht brand, and buyers choose it for exactly that reason.