Anacortes, Washington, is an unassuming sea-salty town near the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound, and the Betts Boats yard is easy for a passerby to miss. But within Betts’ facilities, the dawn of an era in Pacific Northwest production boatbuilding could be breaking with the construction of Hull #1 of the new performance-cruiser Whitacre 47. In true Cascadian fashion, it’ll be locally grown with a sustainable ethos, both environmentally and economically, for rugged off-grid all-weather living. Combined with a high degree of customization and ideal market conditions, the Whitacre 47 is positioned to make quite a splash.
The seeds that sprouted into the Whitacre 47 were first sown when Mike Mullenberg, a yacht broker with his own Anacortes-based brokerage Pacific Cruising Yachts (PCY), sold retired U.S. Navy fighter pilot, aerospace engineer and avid sailor TC Skeels a Dragonfly 1000. After cruising extensively with his wife for over six years, it was time to go bigger.
“TC and I started looking for boats after I sold him his Dragonfly,” Mullenberg told me in the PCY office a few miles from Betts Boats. Mullenberg started working in the sailing industry in 1975 and has made
