A Greenwich Village Professor
and a Radical Idea
Every great boat begins as an idea too strange to ignore. Lively began in the mind of Bob Haberman, a retired college professor who had lived through the creative ferment of Greenwich Village in its heyday. When New York City grew too hostile, he and his wife Gretta sold the building they had developed over decades and went looking for a different kind of life — one measured in tides, not tenure.
Haberman had been studying the Sharpie since the 1970s. First developed around 1830 by New Haven oystermen who put leg-o-mutton sails and centerboards on flat-bottomed skiffs, the Sharpie was never conventionally beautiful, but its shoal draft and ultimate stability made it the most capable working platform of its day. Haberman saw something else in it: a vessel you could nose onto a sandy beach, wade ashore from, and surf around the trade wind islands in. He imagined it scaled up to ocean-crossing size — fast enough to challenge records, shallow enough to explore the canals of Europe.
The Habermans moved to the Pacific Northwest, where one of the last fleets of working Sharpies had operated as 45-foot double-enders in the winter halibut fishery of the Straits of Juan de Fuca. It was the right place to have a visionary idea built.
Bruce Farr Takes
the Commission
When Haberman walked into Bruce Farr's Annapolis office, Gary Williams of the Farr team recalled that no one had met him before. The brief was unusual enough that Farr took an immediate interest. The result was published in Yachting World and featured as a cover story in Sailing magazine in January 1989 — a boat that marine writers struggled to categorize.
Lively was 65 feet on deck, waterline 55'11", beam 15'2", displacement 31,600 pounds. The 49-foot mast carried 1,450 square feet of sail. Farr described her as traditional in form but modern in execution, using Northwest materials within a budget to retain the Sharpie's economic character while bringing it firmly into the late 20th century.
Interior design fell to C.A. Surdyke & Co., who managed the considerable challenge of creating 6'6" headroom while accommodating the daggerkeel trunk rising through the center of the main saloon. The result was striking: light hardwood veneers throughout, an elliptical midship bulkhead, roomy cabins fore and aft.
Haberman named her for H.V. Lively — the first documented vessel to complete a Trans-Atlantic crossing — a name that carried both historical weight and personal ambition.
John Guzzwell's
Hands
The man Haberman trusted to turn Farr's lines into reality was John Guzzwell — already famous as the first Englishman to circumnavigate solo, builder of the immortal 21-foot Trekka, and the most respected craftsman of cold-molded construction in the Pacific Northwest. Guzzwell built the hull using marine-grade plywood in cold-molded layers, a technique he had refined over decades.
"Sailing magazine described her as a greyhound of the ULDB ideal."
It took nearly two years to complete. When she finally went in the water, Lively proved light, fast, and maneuverable in ways that surprised even her designers. In the Oakland-to-Catalina race, a crew sailing without Haberman reported sustained speeds keeping pace with Zeus and the Santa Cruz 50s — remarkable company for any 65-foot cruiser.
Haberman's grand ambitions — a Cape Horn record and a production line of sister ships — eventually gave way to something more honest. He and Gretta settled into gentle coastal cruising off San Diego, sliding past Point Loma toward the Pacific swells in a boat that, on any given day, could have outrun everything in sight.
The First
Encounter
I first saw Lively at the dock after she finished the San Francisco to Catalina race. I had just come in aboard Zeus, a Mac 65 I had been crewing on for more than a decade, and we were first to finish. Friends who had sailed down aboard Lively couldn't stop talking about her: how she moved, how she handled, the way she seemed to find speed in conditions that left other boats working.
Then life moved on, and it was nearly ten years before I saw her again. By that point I had my own track record on the water. I had sailed my ultralight Blackjack, another 65-footer, finishing first in the San Francisco to Santa Cruz race. And before that on Blackjack, I had set a record in the double-handed Long Beach to Hawaii Transpac — first overall, double-handed, a class record that stood for ten years.
It was after the Santa Cruz finish that I ran into Bill Lee — the man who designed Merlin, who held the Transpac elapsed time record for twenty years, who essentially defined the Ultra Light Displacement Boat as a class. He told me to forget the SC70 bare hull I had been considering. He told me I needed to go look at a boat in San Diego.
"That's where my journey with Lively began."
Built
Again
To guide the transformation I turned to Bob Smith — a naval architect who earned his degree in mechanical engineering and naval architecture at UC Berkeley, joined Farr Yacht Design as a staff naval architect in 1987, later became Chief Naval Architect at Santa Cruz Yachts, and spent eleven years as a design engineer with BMW Oracle Racing across three America's Cup campaigns: AC31, AC32, and AC33.
When Bob looked at Lively, he wasn't reading a design from the outside. He was reconnecting with work his own office had produced, and he brought that institutional memory to every recommendation he made. His guidance was clear: simplify, and make her honest.
The lifting daggerkeel was removed entirely and the hull restructured for a fixed conventional keel. The original barn-door rudder assembly was replaced with a new design by Merfyn Owen of Owen Clarke Design — one of the world's leading yacht design studios — and hand-built by Kelly Howel of Santa Cruz Yachts, whose fabrication work is known throughout the Pacific offshore circuit for its precision and durability.
What emerged was a different boat in philosophy, though every plank Guzzwell laid was still there. Haberman had built a dreamer's vessel — remarkable, unconventional, and full of systems that rewarded a specific vision. What Bob Smith and I built together was a passagemaker: simpler, stronger, more honest, and ready for whatever the ocean actually offers.
"She was a dream first. She is a passagemaker now."