Edel sailboats for sale

Buying a used Edel: the numbered cruisers and the catamarans are different boats from different companies

A used Edel is one of two distinct products carrying the same family name: a numbered fiberglass monohull cruiser from the original Décines yard, or a French-built catamaran from Edel Strat, the company that took over after the original firm's 1983 liquidation. Both trace back to Maurice and Pierre Edel's 1956 shipyard near Lyon, but which company actually built a given hull — and how much runway that company had left when it did — shifted considerably across the decades, which matters more than usual here since the whole enterprise, under its final name, shut down for good in January 1995.

Which era to target

The numbered cruisers came first: small, largely coastal boats built by the original company from the mid-1960s through the early-to-mid 1980s, designed almost entirely in-house by Maurice Edel, with the Edel 3 as the sole model commissioned from an outside architect. After the original company's 1980 bankruptcy and 1983 reorganization into Edel Strat, the range shifted to catamarans designed with naval architect Sylvestre Langevin — the Cat 15 and Cat 26 first, then the Cat 33 and Cat 35, and finally the Cat 42/43 that closed out the company's history. A boat from either wing reflects a genuinely different design era and a different corporate parent, so it's worth treating "Edel" as two successive companies rather than one continuous line when weighing what factory support or documentation a given hull could realistically have.

What to inspect across the range

Several of the numbered cruisers, the 4 and the 6 among them, were built with cast-iron rather than lead keels — worth confirming keel material and condition on a boat from this era rather than assuming. On the catamaran side, the Cat 33 and its enlarged Cat 35 derivative used a dismantlable hull-to-cockpit and bridgedeck assembly joined by aluminum beams, built to be delivered and reassembled in kit form; those mechanical joints are worth a close look on survey given the structural role they play in holding the two hulls together. On at least one of the numbered cruisers, some owners have swapped the original inboard diesel for a small outboard, so it's worth confirming what propulsion is actually fitted on a given boat rather than assuming the original specification.

Navigating the lineup

The numbered cruisers run small and coastal, better suited to club sailing and short cruising than passagemaking, while the catamaran side scales from the compact, camping-oriented Cat 15 and Cat 26 up through the larger Cat 33, Cat 35, and Cat 42/43. Buyers should settle on hull type and era first — monohull cruiser or catamaran, original company or Edel Strat — before comparing individual models on the full model directory on this page.