Its design goal was to build the finest 28-foot sailing yacht available, using the state of the art materials and techniques available at the time and construct the boat on a modern assembly line basis, to realize good economy and production quality.

[3] The Sabre 28 is a small recreational keelboat, built predominantly of fiberglass, with extensive teak wood trim.

It has a masthead sloop rig, a raked stem, vertical transom, skeg-mounted rudder controlled by a ship's wheel and a swept fixed fin keel.

Other features include a foredeck hatch, four opening and four fixed ports, internal halyards for both the mainsail and the genoa, raised by a mast-mounted winch.

In honoring the design, the hall cited, "If Roger Hewson and his associates at Sabre Yachts hadn’t hit a sweet spot with the 28 – bringing the look and feel of a yacht into the pocket-cruiser size range – they wouldn’t have had a 15-year production run, nor gone on to build close to 2000 larger sail and power boats.