Cape Cod sailboats for sale

Buying a used Cape Cod: pedigree with class backing, not an orphan hull

A used Cape Cod Shipbuilding boat comes with an unusually long paper trail. The Wareham, Massachusetts yard was founded in 1899, passed to the Goodwin family in 1939, and moved to fiberglass construction in the late 1940s — building not its own designs but licensed and purchased plans from outside naval architects throughout its history. That continuity matters more to a used-boat buyer than it would for a builder that changed hands or design direction repeatedly: a Cape Cod hull's condition risk is mostly about age and upkeep, not about guessing which era or ownership regime built it well. The DaySailer sharpens that case further — it wasn't just a design the yard licensed, but a boat whose rights the Day Sailer Class Association held outright, with Cape Cod Shipbuilding named the authorized builder under an agreement the two struck in 1995. Buying one means buying into a class-supported hull rather than an orphan design.

Which era to target

The earliest wooden era, from the 1899 founding through the 1940s, produced pleasure and commercial boats, including Coast Guard craft and, during the Second World War, war tugs and launches built to a forced draft limit of under 15 feet so they could navigate the Wareham River. Fiberglass arrived in a documented burst starting in 1947: the first fiberglass MK Dinghy in 1948, the Herreshoff Bull's Eye in 1949, a lead keel fitted to a fiberglass hull and the Rhodes 18 and Mercury converted to fiberglass in 1950, the Raven in 1951, the Atlantic in 1956, the Knockabout in 1959, and the Goldeneye in 1960 — each dated as the first fiberglass example of that design, not necessarily the model's design origin, so treat these as construction-era markers rather than exact model ages. Two further eras are worth knowing: the Cape Cod Cat, first molded in fiberglass in 1972 under the Herman Cat name before being marketed as the Cape Cod Cat from 1980 to 2006, and the DaySailer, built under the class licence beginning in 1995 (a second account is consistent with 1994).

For dating an individual hull, Cape Cod Shipbuilding's own numbering method helps: each model's hull numbers restarted at 1 every year, with the last two digits encoding the year built, and every boat carries a Coast Guard Hull Identification Number beginning with the manufacturer code CAC — worth checking against a listing's stated year.

Navigating the lineup

The range splits roughly into one-design racers built to outside plans — the Shields and the Mercury, both Sparkman & Stephens designs with their own class fleets — daysailers and small cruisers descended from Herreshoff and Wittholz lines, and the class-licensed DaySailer. The full model directory on this page breaks each out individually with its own year range and dimensions.