Colgate sailboats for sale

Buying a used Colgate: a training-boat brief, not a boatyard's product line

A listing under "Colgate" isn't from a Colgate boatyard. The Colgate 26 is a one-design class built to a brief set by Steve Colgate, founder of Offshore Sailing School, engineered by naval architect Jim Taylor, and built by Precision Boat Works of Palmetto, Florida. That commissioning structure matters to a buyer: the boat wasn't built to satisfy a racing rule but to satisfy Offshore Sailing School's own insurance requirements, and Colgate said the resulting standard was tougher than anything a private owner or racing fleet would need to meet on its own. Practically, that means a boat engineered from day one for hard, repeated, inexpert use -- exactly the asymmetry a used buyer wants working in their favor. And because the entire catalog is one model from one production run, the model-to-model decision tree buyers face with bigger, longer-running brands doesn't apply here: what varies boat to boat is condition and history, not specification.

Which era to target

Every Colgate 26 comes from a single production history: designed by Jim Taylor to Colgate's brief and built by Precision Boat Works, founded in 1978. There's no builder-succession question to sort through the way there is with brands that changed hands over the decades -- the specification is consistent across the line. What does vary is provenance. Fleet-retired examples exist in the used market because institutions bought the boat in numbers: the U.S. Naval Academy selected it as its primary training fleet at launch, and the U.S. Naval and Coast Guard Academies later ran it as their official training vessel under the "Navy 26" name. A documented service history with one of those academies, or with Offshore Sailing School itself, is worth asking a seller about.

Navigating the lineup

The Colgate 26 is the only model in this catalog, so there's no size band or line to weigh it against -- the buying decision comes down to condition, rig, and history rather than choosing between models in the full model directory on this page.