Cambria sailboats for sale

Buying a used Cambria: a hand-built hull, not a production-line badge

A used Cambria isn't a purchase you make on brand recognition the way you would with a high-volume production builder. David Walters Yachts built the whole line at a single Portsmouth, Rhode Island facility over a run that lasted only a handful of years before the U.S. luxury tax on boats ended it, and the boats were largely hand-finished by the same small team of craftsmen David and Betsy Walters assembled. With a run that small, condition on the individual hull does more of the talking than the marque does. David Walters Yachts' own history notes that surveyors, over the years, found the boats' construction and finish comparable to the best yachts built in the US and Europe — a reputation worth weighing against whatever state any specific hull is actually in.

Which era to target

The production window was compact enough that model year matters less here than which mold and which keel a given hull came from. Population size differs sharply between the two mold families: only eight hulls came off the smaller 40-foot molds, against twenty off the larger molds behind the 44, 46, 48 and 50 — so the larger sister-hull range is both the more common find and the size band where the model number on a listing matters least, since it's essentially one hull under four labels. Keel configuration is the sharper dividing line than model year within either family: expect the standard shoal centerboard setup on nearly every hull you look at, and treat a fixed keel as a documented rarity — only four boats across the entire run got one — worth confirming specifically if a listing doesn't mention it, since it changes both draft and how the boat handles.

Navigating the lineup

Sizing up a used Cambria is less about comparing model numbers than matching your cruising plans to one of the two hull families the line was cut from: the smaller 40-foot hull for a more modest cruising boat, or the larger 44/46/48/50 family — built on a shared 37-foot waterline — for more room aboard without stepping into a genuinely different design. The full model directory on this page breaks out sizes and years individually.