Friendship sailboats for sale

Buying a used Friendship: confirm which boat you're looking at first

The name Friendship covers three boats with nothing in common beyond it, and sorting out which one a listing describes comes before anything else. Most used listings are the Dutch production cruiser — a line rebuilt across a chain of different owners and at least two bankruptcies between 1968 and 2002, so a hull's era and builder matter as much as its size or condition. A listing could also be the Maine-style gaff sloop reproduction, a completely different boat under an unrelated fiberglass hull, or a Fontaine-designed daysailer with joystick sail controls. Once that's settled, the Dutch cruiser's buying calculus turns on tracing a specific hull to a specific era and yard, since construction and specification both shifted with each change of ownership.

Which era to target

On the Dutch line, era tracks ownership closely. Boats from the original Balk-based yard, built between 1968 and its 1991 bankruptcy, are hand-laid in solid glass with balsa-sandwich decks; the later boats in that run moved to isophthalic resin in the outer laminate for better osmosis resistance, worth asking about on an older hull. Boats built after the yard's move to a new Makkum facility in 1995 used different materials again, including a Twaron aramid-fiber layup on the 38, though very few examples of that model exist. Boats from the brief 1997-98 restart or the informal period that followed are rarer still. Anything built since 2002 comes from the current Lemmer-based rights-holder. Era matters less for the other two Friendships: the Maine-type reproduction follows a much older design with no comparable generational split, and the modern daysailer is a single design.

What to inspect across the range

Across the Dutch-built boats, balsa-sandwich decks are a recurring watch item — moisture ingress has been documented on both smaller and larger models in the line, and is worth probing for with a moisture meter during survey. On the flagship-sized model specifically, original aluminum-framed windows were prone to leaking before the yard switched to standard, better-sealing panes, so it's worth confirming which type a given hull carries. On older boats generally, aging single-circuit-cooled engines are frequently near the end of their service life and should be budgeted for accordingly.

Navigating the lineup

Within the Dutch line, size bands run from small daysailer-cruisers in the low 20-foot range up through a flagship-sized model near 30 feet and on to larger, later Makkum-built hulls in the mid-30s to 38 feet — the full model directory on this page breaks out what was actually built and when. Whichever Friendship you're weighing, confirming its identity first will settle almost everything else about the search.