In early 2001, Fontaine drew up plans, did some market research, and approached a few companies to license his designs. No one was interested, so he tracked down a boatbuilder in New Zealand and founded the Friendship Yacht Co. The first Friendship 40 was completed in 2003.

Pierre Crosby, owner of Uberto Construction in Manhattan, bought the second one. “We did not want something that we could cross the Atlantic in,” he says. After considering all the daysailers on the market, Crosby chose the Friendship 40 because, he says, the level of craftsmanship can’t be beat. He was taken by the boat’s classic design and appreciates the layout, which affords full headroom below deck.

The competition soon caught up with Fontaine. Hinckley, which had turned down his idea, produced its first large daysailer, the 42 DS, just months after Fontaine’s first Friendship 40 was completed; it has so far built seven of them. Fontaine sells six a year. While those may seem like small numbers, each of these boats takes nearly a year to build, and both companies are surprised at the brisk pace of business.

For the significant price tags on the Hinckley and Friendship yachts, buyers get to tinker with a lot of details. The basic form of the boat—including the high-tech composite hull—is always the same. But clients can choose everything from the type of wood used to build the deck to the layout of the interior. Fontaine compares the process with buying a private jet: It may be a Gulfstream on the outside, but each one is going to be different.

Fontaine has had clients decide to forgo the full galley and fly custom-made lava countertops from France to New Zealand to be installed in his boats. The Hinckley can be fitted with a retractable keel that allows the vessel to maneuver in water as shallow as four feet deep, so owners can avoid wrangling over expensive and increasingly rare slips, and can instead dock outside their waterfront homes. “We have buyers that are actually shopping for waterfront homes just for their boats,” says Phil Bennett, the company’s senior sales director.

Morris’ M36, which starts out at $340,000, has fewer customizable options. That has allowed it to produce the model in higher quantities, which has transformed the 35-year-old company, boosting its output from six boats a year to 25. It’s been on a hiring binge and added 20,000 square feet of production space just for the M series. As the popularity of these yachts grows, so does their size. Morris added a 42- and a 53-foot model to its M series. Friendship now has a 53- and a 75-foot version of its boat.

“Daysailing is not a trend,” Morris says. “Unless, all of a sudden, people turn off their BlackBerrys and start taking six-week vacations, it is here to stay.”