Corbin sailboats for sale

Buying a used Corbin: a factory hull, usually finished by someone else

A used Corbin is, more often than not, a boat its owner finished rather than the factory. Only about 15 of the roughly 200 hulls the yard moulded were completed to a high standard on-site; the rest were sold as kits, at one of four stages of completion, for amateur builders to carry the rest of the way. That means the biggest variable in any individual Corbin isn't the design or the yard's construction standards, both of which held steady across the range — it's how well, and by whom, that particular hull was finished.

Which era to target

The range's clearest inspection boundary traces to a fire at Corbin's Chateauguay factory at the end of 1982, which wiped out the deck moulds and forced a redesign. Hulls built before it, roughly numbered 1 through 129, carry a tighter cockpit and a lower-profile pilothouse; the redesign that followed gave later hulls a bigger cockpit, a taller pilothouse trunk, a raised rig, and a mast base moved forward by roughly two and a half feet. The Corbin 39 Owners' Association has noted that a handful of pre-fire-spec hulls likely continued to be built past the fire, up to somewhere around hull No. 135, so hull number is a more reliable era marker than a strict fire-date cutoff. Hull construction itself didn't change across the whole run, so the era split is about cockpit and rig ergonomics rather than structural difference. Production wound down around 1990, though sources put the final year anywhere from 1989 to 1991.

What to inspect across the range

Several issues turn up often enough in owner and reviewer accounts to check for on any hull, regardless of era. Compression-post corrosion, most often where the post meets the bilge or braces against the deck, has been reported by multiple owners; a common fix is replacing the post with 316 stainless steel. Some hulls show fiberglass roving telegraphing through the gelcoat, and some decks have developed crazing attributed to thick paint application; cockpit lockers run small across the range. SAILING Magazine's Used Boat Notebook has also found that factory-completed boats tend to be in better shape than owner-finished ones, which makes a hull's completion history worth asking about directly rather than judging by age alone.

Navigating the lineup

Choosing between the aft-cockpit and centre-cockpit 39 is mostly a layout preference, since both received the same post-fire updates; a smaller 35-foot version also appeared briefly for buyers wanting less boat. It's also worth treating any origin story about a specific hull with some skepticism: a long-circulated claim that Corbin's factory-finished boats were built as boat-show demonstrators has been disputed by the Corbin 39 Owners' Association, which says most went directly to clients and that only one hull — a later Mk2 numbered 129 — actually served as a demo, later becoming Marius Corbin's own boat. The full model directory on this page breaks out the range for closer comparison.