Dolphin sailboats for sale

Buying a used Dolphin: confirm which lineage before anything else

A "Dolphin" listing tells you almost nothing on its own: at least six unrelated builders have used the name, and a boat's construction, era, and basic pedigree depend entirely on which one built it. Nothing carries over between a Dolphin built in an Italian composite yard and one built by a small Brazilian or British firm decades apart -- treat every listing as its own investigation until the model number and builder confirm the lineage.

Which era to target

The Maxi Dolphin lineage spans the longest range and the most eras: a 1990s one-design program that built the Dolphin 81 in the hundreds gave way to Luca Brenta's 1999 semi-custom MD65, the in-house MD33 day sailer, and Mark Mills's 2019 MD75 Karma -- four different design briefs under one Erbusco yard, which changed ownership in 2016. The Brazilian Dolphin 460 belongs to a much narrower window: its own review found the design only five years old and still establishing itself as an affordable bluewater catamaran. The British Dolphin 31 dates to a single 1976 design built for the charter market, and the American S&S Dolphin 24 to 1959 -- though buyers should expect to find the identical hull sold rebadged under a dozen other builder names, so a search limited to "Dolphin" alone may miss it entirely.

Navigating the lineup

Because these lineages share nothing but a name, the more useful filter on the models table below is builder and country, not size or price band -- an Italian composite yard, a Brazilian catamaran builder, a British monohull yard, and an American design house each carry completely different construction histories and completely different expectations for documentation. Cross-check any listing's model number and builder against the lineage it actually belongs to before comparing it to anything else on this page.