Madrone is a 1996 Taswell 43. She is built of fiberglass, is a cutter-rigged sloop, and sports a long fin keel and a partial skeg in front of her balanced rudder. For a great introduction and overview of Madrone, check out this video.
The Taswell brand of sailboats was started by the Ta Shing boatyard in 1998. Long recognized as one of the highest quality yards in Taiwan, Ta Shing contracted with naval architect Bill Dixon to design a line of high-performance cruising vessels. Initially available in 43, 49, 56, and 72, the line was eventually extended with deck salon designs and hulls that were sometimes lengthened by a foot or two to extend the swimstep.
There were a total of 63 Taswell 43 hulls built. Madrone is hull #61.
Ta Shing is still in business, but they no longer build sailboats – all of their capacity is now used to serve the Nordhavn trawler market. And Bill Dixon has moved on to mostly design superyachts. But we feel lucky that they worked together on the Taswell series of boats – to us, it feels like a great combination of beautiful lines, solid construction, fantastic finish-work, and surprising speed for a sea-kindly cruising vessel. We much prefer sailing to motoring, so we’re very happy to have a boat that can still make decent way in 5 or 6 knots of true wind.
We became Madrone’s owners in 2012. Originally named Aestus, she was purchased by the first owners in Seattle. From that point until the time of our purchase, she was very rarely used – when we found her, the engine only had 250 hours of time on the clock and the sails were in very good condition.
Since then, we’ve definitely changed the usage pattern. Madrone has now taken us over 30,000 miles in safety and comfort, and we’re even happier with her now than when we bought her.
In 2023, we made the very difficult decision to move on to a larger boat, and Jim and Janet became Madrone’s new caretakers. Her hailing port is now West Dennis, MA, and Madrone will be exploring the US east coast in more detail over the next few years.