Overview
The Cheoy Lee Clipper 36 is one of four sizes (33, 36, 42, and 48 ft) in a series designed by Bill Luders and built at the Cheoy Lee shipyard on Hong Kong’s Pearl River. Its classic proportions, a moderate-overhang, full-keel hull with a divided ketch sailplan and a bowsprit, drew comparisons to L. Francis Herreshoff’s Ticonderoga and made the Clipper series a fixture of the American cruising-boat market through the 1970s and 1980s.
History
Cheoy Lee built the Clipper 36 from 1969 to 1988, with about 60 hulls completed. Like much of Cheoy Lee’s output of the era, it benefited from skilled, labor-intensive Hong Kong craftsmanship, evident in its lavish teak interior joinery. The design remained popular enough that boats continued arriving in the U.S. market well after production wound down.
Design and Construction
The hull is solid fiberglass, notably thick (roughly 7/16 in at the sheer to a full inch at the keel), with fiberglass decks finished in a teak overlay and bulkheads well bonded to the hull. Standard rig is a staysail ketch with wooden spars and a bowsprit; the same hull was also offered as a cutter or as a two-masted schooner. At just over 16,000 lb with a 33 percent ballast ratio on an iron keel, it is a heavy, traditional design rather than a light performance cruiser, and independent reviewers note it does not excel upwind or down, nor does it back down particularly well under power.
Under Sail
Owners rate seaworthiness highly once the boat stiffens up from its initial tenderness, and the full keel with attached rudder gives the kind of forgiving, tracking-oriented manners typical of the type. Practical Sailor flags one real offshore-relevant limitation worth taking seriously: the original cable-quadrant steering had no provision for an emergency rudder on some boats, a genuine gap for anyone planning serious passages rather than coastal cruising. No documented named ocean passage was found for this specific model in this research pass.
Buyers Notes
Survey priorities are real and well documented: gelcoat quality was inconsistent from the factory (one owner repainted topsides after only three years), teak decks are prone to leaking and costly to address (one reported replacement ran $14,000), the iron keel needs a maintained epoxy coating to resist corrosion, the cored fiberglass rudder can split, and non-marine plywood was used in some bulkheads, a rot risk worth checking directly. The original electrical system used positive-ground wiring, which complicates troubleshooting and modern equipment integration, and stainless chainplates were originally through-bolted with iron fasteners prone to corrosion.
