Concordia sailboats for sale

Buying a used Concordia: brand pedigree built on a single, decades-old wooden design

A used Concordia almost always means one specific boat: a wooden yawl a German yard built to order for the Padanaram, Massachusetts, firm across nearly three decades, on terms informal enough that payment followed delivery rather than the other way around. That vintage cuts both ways for a buyer. The design's staying power is real: Soundings counted 102 of the original 103 boats still extant, decades after the last hull was shipped, a survival rate that speaks to how well these boats were built and how well they've been kept. But a boat built to order more than half a century ago demands scrutiny of hull, rig, and structure well beyond whatever the Concordia name promises on its own — condition, not brand, is what separates one used yawl from another.

Which era to target

Nearly the entire used market sits inside a single 28-year production run, 1938 to 1966, all but four of the 103 boats built at the same German yard to one unchanging Hunt design. Within that run there is no meaningfully distinct later generation to weigh against an earlier one, so era mostly matters for maintenance history rather than for design differences. A buyer may also come across a Concordia 47 on the market: a 1996 Bruce Farr design built by Carroll Marine in modern composite construction, with no established link to the Padanaram lineage. It should be evaluated as its own boat, not shopped as a Concordia in the historical sense.

What to inspect across the range

The wooden yawls carry a distinctive foredeck skylight that SAIL magazine's reviewer singled out as an ongoing weak point, letting water below when green water crosses the deck — a fitting worth putting on any survey's checklist regardless of hull number. Given the fleet's age, that kind of deck-hardware and structural detail is where a survey should concentrate, rather than assuming the boat's reputation stands in for its actual condition.

Navigating the lineup

Shopping used Concordia mostly means choosing among decades of one design rather than between distinct lines, so an individual boat's maintenance history matters more than which year it was built. The rare Concordia 47, where one turns up, is a different animal entirely — a modern composite one-off, not a variation on the yawl. The full model directory on this page breaks out the individual boats available.