Golden Hind sailboats for sale

Buying a used Golden Hind: one design, four builders to sort out

A Golden Hind's history runs through four separate builders across five decades - Hartwells, Terry Erskine, Golden Hind Marine, and finally Newson Boatbuilders, which has since closed with the moulds believed lost. No single company's reputation or quality standard covers the whole run, so a used-Golden Hind search means identifying which builder and era produced a given hull before judging the boat itself. The shoal-draft hull form and Maurice Griffiths' original design intent carried through every era; the construction underneath it did not.

Which era to target

Only 15 Hartwells hulls were ever built, all plywood under Cascover sheathing - the scarcest and oldest boats to find, and the ones where sheathing and fastener condition deserve the closest look before anything else. Terry Erskine's yard, running from 1971 until he stopped in 1982, accounts for most of what comes up for sale: glassed hulls carrying a wood deck, wood cabinhouse, and cast-iron ballast in the keel. Golden Hind Marine's "Mark II," built from 1995 on under Mark Urry, is the highest-spec build in the lineage - WaveTrain rates it above Erskine's - and three of the five Mark II hulls carry a lead keel rather than cast iron, a detail worth confirming on any individual Mark II rather than assuming.

What to inspect across the range

Moisture in the wood deck and coachroof is the recurring issue across the fiberglass-hull era: the deck and coachroof beams are hardwood covered with marine plywood sheathed in epoxy, and any leak wicks quickly along the plywood's horizontal sections, which is why many original all-plywood boats have deteriorated over time, per WaveTrain. The same source notes that cutting out and replacing a saturated deck section is comparatively straightforward - worth budgeting for as routine upkeep on an older hull rather than treating as disqualifying.

Navigating the lineup

The Golden Hind 31 line - Erskine-built and Mark II alike - makes up the bulk of what's out there; per WaveTrain, most surviving Golden Hinds were built by Erskine specifically. The 26 is a genuinely different design, built off a separate mould lineage rather than a scaled-down 31, and turns up in far smaller numbers. The 39 and the related Gulf Stream 42 sit at the top of the range, each built only a handful of times. The full model directory on this page breaks down what's actually available by size and era.