Corby sailboats for sale

Buying a used Corby: expect the builder to matter as much as the model

A used Corby is defined as much by who built it as by which model it is. Twenty of Corby's boats were built in his own shed on the Isle of Wight; nineteen more came from a rotating list of outside yards working to his drawings, including production runs in Poland and Turkey. That split means two boats sharing a model name can differ meaningfully in construction and finish, depending on which builder actually laid up the hull — worth establishing before judging any individual boat on the strength of the Corby name alone.

Which era to target

The clearest era marker in Corby's range is 1995, when the Mustang Sally design brought what Corby himself called a total change in design direction and introduced the Corby Transom — a boundary separating his early one-off custom yachts, including a trio built in-house over the winter of 1992-93, from the shapes that followed. Within the standardized end of the range, the timeline splits again in 2005, when a yard in Gdansk, Poland began production of the 29, 33, and 26 — the closest thing to a conventional single-source production run in Corby's history — with Turkish production of his designs following in 2008. The Corby 25 sits earlier and outside that Polish/Turkish standardization: it began as a one-off cedar-strip build in 2000, and the roughly 20 boats built from its moulds passed through at least three different builders across two countries before production ended, so buyers should expect more construction variation within the 25 than within the later Polish-built models.

Navigating the lineup

Buyers seeking the most standardized used Corby should look to the 2005 Polish-built range — the 29, 33, and 26 — where construction followed a single production run rather than a rotating cast of builders. The smaller 25, with its more scattered production history, rewards closer attention to which specific builder produced a given hull. And for buyers weighing a Corby against a custom commission rather than a used purchase, it's worth remembering that much of Corby's output was built to individual owners' specifications in the first place — variance, not standardization, is the norm across the marque. The full model directory on this page breaks out the range for closer comparison.