Image: Last Dance at anchor, Fox Island in the North Channel, Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada, 2018.
Arthur DeFever designed many boats, but never was a constructor. He worked with marine construction companies to build his designs. The first two DeFever 40 Passagemakers were built in Taiwan, but Arthur was not satisfied with the quality. A new yard to build the boats had to be found. The fuel crisis of the 1970's made fuel-efficient trawlers big sellers, drawing many boat manufacturers to add trawlers to their line. A U.S. builder wanting to expand their offerings picked up the Passagemaker design, building both the Passagemaker 34 and Passagemaker 40.
Last Dance was built at Jensen Marine Corporation in Costa Mesa, California. Jensen was building high quality and high-performance sailboats under the brand name Cal. They built 18,000 Cal sailboats.
Fiberglass was not used in the construction of larger boats until the early 1970's. Grand Banks, a popular brand of trawler-type boats, moved from wood construction to fiberglass in 1974. (An aside: The Grand Banks Alaskan was a DeFever design.) Jensen Marine had years of experience with fiberglass in building the Cal sailboats. Designers and builders did not fully understand the strength of fiberglass, so the early fiberglass boats were built with hulls as thick as the previously built wooden boats.
Last Dance's hull is over an inch thick, solid fiberglass. Contemporary boat design favors performance over strength with boat hulls constructed of a sandwich - two thin layers of fiberglass separated by a light-weight medium such as balsa wood or foam. A grounding can fracture a sandwich hull or hitting a rock can hole the hull, either resulting in catastrophic failure and sinking.
