Achilles sailboats for sale

Buying a used Achilles: a small yard's own racing record behind every hull

An Achilles is a boat one man raced himself. Chris Butler designed the range - alone, after the first model - then sailed his own designs to offshore race wins, which makes the brand's identity inseparable from its designer's own sailing rather than from any dealer network or marketing campaign. For a buyer, that history doesn't substitute for inspection: this was a small yard that closed decades ago, so condition on an individual hull matters more than any assumption drawn from the badge itself.

Which era to target

The Achilles 24 is the range's longest-running and most numerous model, and it changed in small, documented ways over its production - early boats had three cabin windows, later changed to a single long window, a visual marker worth using to place a given hull in its production era. The Achilles 9 Metre followed, begun on Butler's 40th birthday around 1972 as his first solo yacht design. The 840 came last, launched in 1979 as a beamier, better-appointed boat built with distance racing and singlehanding in mind - worth targeting specifically if accommodation and singlehanded rigging matter more than the 24's longer production run and larger used pool.

What to inspect across the range

Engines are the recurring issue on the 24: most were sold without one, with an optional inboard petrol engine usually swapped out early for a small diesel, so a used 24's engine compartment is more likely to hold a retrofit than original equipment - worth asking about directly. Keel configuration also varies within the model: the 24 was built with both a bulbed fin keel and a triple-keel, shoal-draught version, and Yachting Monthly's review judged the triple-keel version's performance "much more pedestrian" than the standard fin - a real difference in sailing character between two boats carrying the same model name. Build quality itself isn't uniform either: Yachting Monthly found factory-built 24s "sound, strong but simple," but flagged that quality on the many home-built examples "will be variable," making confirmation of factory origin worth doing before anything else on a 24.

Navigating the lineup

Three models, three different buying propositions: the 24 is the deepest used-boat pool with the longest production history to research, the 9 Metre represents Butler's first solo design, and the 840 is the newest and most singlehanding-oriented boat in the range. The full model directory on this page breaks out each one's own production window and dimensions.