Cornish Crabbers sailboats for sale

Buying a used Cornish Crabbers: the company has changed more than the boats

A used Cornish Crabbers is a bet on a small yard whose corporate history has been rockier than its design lineage. The company has traded as Cornish Crabbers Ltd since the late 1970s, but it has gone through voluntary liquidation twice — in 2008 and again in 2024 — and passed through several different owners in between. What has stayed comparatively constant is who actually draws and builds the boats: Roger Dongray's gaff-cutter and trailer-sailer designs have carried the range since the 1970s, and the Thomas family runs through both eras, with the late David Thomas contributing several models and his son Peter Thomas now managing the yard that builds every Cornish Crabbers boat under contract. Buying well means treating the ownership history on a listing's paperwork as a separate question from the boat's actual build quality and design pedigree, which have moved on a steadier track of their own.

Which era to target

Model names have shifted more than once, which matters when reading older listings. Before 2015, what is now called the Shrimper 19 was simply the Cornish Shrimper, and the Shrimper 17 was sold as the Crabber 17 — the same boats, renamed rather than redesigned, when Cornish Crabbers reorganized its trailer-sailer range and added the larger Shrimper 21. On the Crabber 24, the earliest Mk I hulls still carry a plywood cockpit and decking over an otherwise fibreglass hull, a mix worth knowing about before comparing an early boat to the later Mk III (built 1991 to 2014) and Mk V (introduced 2017), or to the all-glass Crabber 22 and the lead-ballasted Crabber 26 that followed in 2010. The Pilot Cutter 30 is its own case again, since the current gaff-rigged boat is a 1985 conversion of an earlier yawl-rigged design called the Trader — worth knowing if a listing or older paperwork uses that original name.

Navigating the lineup

The range splits along fairly clear lines: the Classic Series gaff cutters (Crabber 22, Crabber 24, Crabber 26 and the flagship Pilot Cutter 30) for buyers who want the fullest traditional look and, in the Crabber 24's case, the only fixed keel in the family; the Shrimper trailer-sailers (17, 19 and 21) for shoal-draft, easily trailered cruising descended from Roger Dongray's own 19ft design; and the smaller Mystery line for buyers drawn to the David Thomas and Stephen Jones design pedigree rather than the gaff-rig identity. The full model directory on this page breaks each of these down for closer comparison.