Fast Passage sailboats for sale

Buying a used Fast Passage: two builders, one design

A listing filed under "Fast Passage" is not naming a company you can look up -- it is naming a single William Garden design, the Fast Passage 39, built by two different shipyards under two different owners. Roughly three dozen came from Philbrook's Shipyard, in Sidney, British Columbia, before Tollycraft, based in Kelso, Washington, took over the mold in the late 1970s. That split is exactly the kind of thing a make field won't tell you and a boat's own paperwork will, so the first real question about any given Fast Passage 39 is which yard actually built it -- not something to assume from the model name.

Which era to target

There's one boundary that matters here, and it's a builder change rather than a design change. Production ran from 1976 to 1985, split by a single event: Philbrook's sold the Fast Passage mold to Tollycraft sometime in the late 1970s. Philbrook's own count is about 36 boats out of roughly forty total; Cruising World corroborates it almost exactly, crediting Philbrook's with 36 hulls, decks and complete packages against four from Tollycraft, Moonshine among them. Don't discount a Tollycraft hull as a lesser, newer-to-the-material build, though -- per the Tollycraft owners' club history, fiberglass conversion at that yard dates back to 1967, with wooden construction phased out entirely by 1970, well before Tollycraft ever touched the Fast Passage tooling.

What to inspect across the range

How a given hull was finished is worth establishing before anything else. Cruising World documents two very different paths to a finished boat: a kit, where Philbrooks supplied bare hull and deck for an owner to fit out independently, versus a turnkey commission the shipyard completed in-house. Joinery and system quality on an owner-finished boat won't necessarily match a shipyard-finished one, so it's worth asking a seller which path a given boat took. Beyond finish, the same review flags specific points worth a close look on any hull: the tumblehome is handsome but leaves a vulnerable edge, and rub strakes were offered as an option worth checking for; a fuel tank mounted forward affects trim when full; and reaching the emergency tiller on the original 39 meant opening the after lazarette, a real problem in a seaway worth confirming has been addressed.

Navigating the lineup

With only one hull design in play, navigating the lineup mostly means navigating build history -- which yard, and which finish path -- rather than choosing between models. The offshore case for the design itself is concrete rather than reputational: Moonshine, Stokes' Tollycraft hull, took second in Class 2 in the 1982-83 BOC Challenge -- the inaugural singlehanded circumnavigation race, run over roughly 27,000 miles, where fewer than two-thirds of the sixteen-boat fleet reached the finish. Use the full model directory on this page to compare individual boats against that builder-and-finish picture rather than treating "Fast Passage" as a single, uniform product.