Edey sailboats for sale

Buying a used Edey & Duff: pedigree from a yard that no longer builds

Buying an Edey & Duff means buying from a yard that no longer exists: the company closed in 2009, so there is no dealer network standing behind the name and no ongoing production to compare a used hull against. What a buyer is really weighing is the underlying design pedigree — a Crocker-designed Stone Horse, a Herreshoff-designed Doughdish, or a Bolger-designed Dovekie, each built by a small yard rather than drawn by it — against the usual condition risks of an older, closed-production small-yard boat. The Doughdish carries an unusually concrete engineering fact for a used buyer to weigh: Bill Harding's 1973 fiberglass molds were built heavy on purpose, passing up the weight savings the material allowed so the reproduction could race the original 1914 wooden Herreshoff 12½s at one-design parity — a boat engineered for parity, not lightness.

Which era to target

The Stone Horse line splits at the material change: 38 hulls were built in wood at Harwich Port, Massachusetts before the Second World War to Crocker's original design, and the fiberglass version, in Airex-core construction with wood trim, followed once Edey & Duff formed in 1968 to build it — about 150 Stone Horses across the whole run. A Doughdish is fiberglass throughout its production history: introduced in 1973 and produced by Edey & Duff of Mattapoisett for many years afterward, with production passing to new stewardship only after Bill Harding's retirement — worth confirming which builder era a given hull came from before assuming continuity of construction detail. The Dovekie ran a single window, 1978 to 1998.

Navigating the lineup

Choosing among the three lines is mostly a question of design pedigree and hull size: the Stone Horse is the largest and most numerous, the roughly 16-foot Doughdish is the tightest one-design, built to strict Herreshoff dimensions, and the Dovekie is Bolger's rowing-sailing design at about 21 feet. The full model directory on this page breaks each out individually.