Cal sailboats for sale

Buying a used Cal: the marque outlived four different owners, and the boats show it

A used Cal can be a Costa Mesa-built Jensen Marine boat from the 1960s, a Bangor Punta-era boat from the company's peripatetic 1970s, or one of the final Fall River-built boats sold under the O'Day Corporation before production ended in 1989 — three meaningfully different manufacturing contexts sharing one badge. Because the yard, the factory address, and even the corporate parent changed repeatedly over Cal's three decades, dating a prospective boat to its actual build era tells a buyer more than the model name alone. Condition still governs any individual sale, but knowing which chapter built a given hull sets a more honest baseline for what that condition should look like.

Which era to target

Boats built at Jensen Marine in Costa Mesa through the 1960s and into the 1970s come from the construction era Practical Sailor treats as the yard's baseline — hand-laid glasswork, wood-tabbed bulkheads, plywood-cored decks — with blistering historically a minor issue on these older hulls. Some boats built after the factory moved to Tampa, Florida in the early 1980s reportedly had more blistering and other quality problems, per Practical Sailor's review of the Cal 35, which is worth weighing against a specific boat's build years and location rather than trusting the model name alone. Where a model later gained a second-generation "-2" update — the Cal 25 becoming the Cal 25-2 in 1977, the Cal 46 becoming the Cal 2-46 — the change usually addressed a real shortcoming, such as a wider beam, more standing headroom, or a private head, so a later hull often trades some of the original's collector appeal for a more livable interior.

What to inspect across the range

Practical Sailor's reviews across several Cal models turn up the same failure path repeatedly: leaking chainplates letting water into the bulkhead or deck core, producing delamination that ranges from cosmetic to structural — documented on the Cal 34 and the Cal 2-27, and echoed in the class association's own maintenance notes on the Cal 25-2. Gelcoat crazing (Cal 34, Cal 2-27), gate valves instead of proper seacocks on through-hull fittings (Cal 34, Cal 2-27, Cal 25-2), and leaking hull-to-deck joints (Cal 2-27, Cal 40, Cal 39) recur often enough across the lineup to warrant a close look on survey, regardless of which model is under consideration.

Navigating the lineup

The range runs from small trailerable boats like the Cal 20 up through the mid-size 25-, 27-, and 34-footers that built Cal's racer-cruiser reputation, to the long-keeled 46-footers built for distance cruising. Buyers chasing the marque's ocean-racing pedigree should look toward the Cal 40 and its fin-keel, spade-rudder contemporaries; buyers who want easier shorthanded handling and more forgiving maneuvering should look toward the longer-keeled cruising models instead, using the full model directory on this page to compare specific sizes once an era and a type are settled.