Overview
The Rhodes Chesapeake 32 is an American design built an ocean away from its market, a Philip Rhodes cruiser commissioned by a Maryland yacht broker but built in Denmark. It carries Rhodes’s traditional lines, a square-topped cabin house, and a deeper, narrower hull than his better-known Pearson Vanguard, and it arrived in the US in the early 1960s already a curiosity: an American boat with a Danish accent.
History
Philip Rhodes drew the Chesapeake 32 for George Walton, a US yacht broker, who had it built in Denmark rather than at home, likely for cost reasons common at the time. Two Danish yards, Danboats and Sanderson, split the work: about 35 hulls came from Danboats and the rest from Sanderson, roughly 95 boats total between 1960 and 1965 (Baldwin’s own list gives 1961 to 1965, a minor one-year difference from sailboatdata.com’s 1960 start that this entry notes rather than resolves). The boats were sold in the US under several names depending on the importer, including Danboat 33 and ISL 33 alongside Chesapeake 32, which can make tracking a specific hull’s paperwork more confusing than it should be.
Construction
The hull is solid fiberglass on what sailboatdata.com classifies as a modified full keel, matching the full-or-modified-full-keel requirement of every boat on Baldwin’s list. Sailboat.guide’s own spec table for the same boat instead lists the keel as a fin, a real disagreement between two otherwise similar databases; given Baldwin’s explicit vetting criteria and the corroborating classification from sailboatdata.com, this entry treats the boat as full-keeled but flags the conflict rather than hiding it. Ballast is 3,750 lb of an unspecified type, a comparatively modest 32.6 percent of the boat’s 11,500 lb displacement, lower than several full-keel contemporaries on this list. Beam is a narrow 8.75 ft against a 4.75 ft draft, deeper and slimmer than the similar Pearson Vanguard, which trades a bit of interior volume for a more traditional, wood-yacht-adjacent silhouette.
Under Sail
At 468 sq ft of sail on a 22.08 ft waterline, the Chesapeake 32 carries a fairly generous sail plan for its length, and the deeper, narrower hull should reward a well-trimmed boat with a drier, more directionally stable ride than a beamier design of the same era. As with most full-keel boats of this vintage, expect a boat that tracks well and resists rounding up in a gust, at some cost in close-quarters maneuverability under sail alone.
Buyers Notes
Baldwin’s list entry for this boat carries no recorded pluses or minuses of his own, an unusual gap compared to most of his other entries, so there is no first-hand owner testimony from his notes to draw on here. In its absence, a buyer should lean harder than usual on a thorough survey, particularly given the boat’s split production between two overseas yards and its history of being sold under multiple names in the US market: confirming which yard built a specific hull, and cross-checking any paperwork against the Danboat 33 or ISL 33 names as well as Chesapeake 32, is worth doing before assuming a clean chain of ownership history. The keel-type disagreement between sailboatdata.com and sailboat.guide noted above is also worth resolving in person, by inspecting the actual underbody, rather than trusting either database alone.
