Atlantic sailboats for sale

Buying a used Atlantic: identify the builder before anything else

A listing that says "Atlantic" does not, by itself, say much about the boat behind it. The name has been used by at least six unrelated builders — a Greek luxury-monohull yard, an American catamaran designer, Dutch and Swedish cruiser builders, a 1968 UK kit boat, and a small German yard — plus a catboat type that borrows the word from a place name rather than a company. None of them share a hull, a design, or, in most cases, even a home country. Buying used means identifying which Atlantic is actually for sale before judging its era or its condition: get that wrong, and every other judgment about the boat — expected construction, available support, what kind of sailing it was built for — gets applied to the wrong builder entirely.

Which era to target

The Greek yard, Atlantic Yachts, belonged to founder Marc Anassis for only about eight years, until he sold the company in the early 1990s, after roughly 850 boats had been built — so any Greek Atlantic monohull was built during that single ownership era, under the man who founded the yard. Chris White's Atlantic Catamarans, by contrast, trace an unbroken design line back to 1983, and the builder reports zero structural rudder failures across half a million sailing miles over 23 years, a track record worth weighing against a given hull's age. Jachtwerf Atlantic, in the Netherlands, has been under the same ownership since 2005, building to the CE A norm. Wasa Yachts built its Atlantic 51 in only a handful of hulls starting in 1983, so any example on the market is inherently scarce. The Atlantic Clipper 36, a 1968 design sold partly as a kit, and Gade Marine's roughly 70-boat Atlantic 23 from the mid-1970s are both small-production, decades-old boats where individual build quality — kit-assembled or factory — matters as much as the model itself.

Navigating the lineup

Model number alone won't identify which Atlantic a listing describes — the number 55 belongs to both a Greek monohull cruiser and an American catamaran, built continents apart with nothing in common but the digits. Hull type and country of origin are more reliable guides: a variable-draft aluminum cruiser points to the Dutch yard; a composite catamaran points to Chris White's design series; a fiberglass ketch, sloop, or catboat from a small production run points to one of the smaller yards. Establishing which builder is behind a given hull is worth doing before comparing it against anything else in the full model directory on this page.