Bayfield sailboats for sale

Buying a used Bayfield: production-built where Ted Gozzard's traditional lines began

A used Bayfield buys into the same traditional lines Ted Gozzard later built one at a time under his own name — clipper bow, wood trail boards, full keel — except that Bayfield built them at genuine production-line pace rather than as semi-custom orders. That scale matters for a buyer today: it left behind a deep pool of hulls to search, spread across six models from 23 to 40 feet, rather than a handful of hard-to-find boats. The yard itself has been closed since the late 1980s, though, so every boat on the market is decades old, and the original builder is no longer around to answer questions.

Which era to target

The clearest dividing line in the range is the boat that started it all: the Bayfield 23, in production from 1970, evolved into the Bayfield 25, which Sailing Magazine calls something of a cult boat among buyers chasing the smallest, earliest version of the marque. The 30, launched in 1973 and quickly known in the U.S. as the 32, became the line's clear workhorse and is the model most likely to turn up for sale, with a production run long enough that most of its quirks are well documented. At the top of the range, the 36 and the 40 (a ketch) arrived later, in the 1980s; Ted Gozzard designed nearly everything Bayfield built, but the 36 was designed instead by his brother Haydn, per Canadian Boating — worth knowing if a single-designer pedigree matters to a given buyer.

What to inspect across the range

The most consistently flagged issue in the early range is mechanical: Sailing Magazine's Used Boat Notebook says the hydraulic drive fitted to Bayfield's earliest hulls proved problematic, so it's worth confirming any boat from that first run has since been converted to a conventional drivetrain. The same review notes some Bayfield 32 owners finding corrosion in both fuel and water tanks — a detail worth checking on any older tank set, regardless of model. On the 36, Canadian Boating flags a more specific risk: water can work its way into the porous zone between the outer hull skin and the lead ballast after keel damage, which makes a careful survey worthwhile following any hard grounding.

Navigating the lineup

Six models span the range, from the 23-footer that started the line up to the 40-foot ketch flagship, with the 30/32 as the volume model most buyers will encounter and the 36 and 40 covering the largest, latest end of the yard's output. The full model directory on this page breaks down specifics for each size and era, so a buyer can weigh hull length and build year against how much of Gozzard's own hand was in a given design.