Gunboat sailboats for sale

Buying a used Gunboat: three factories, one carbon-construction throughline

A used Gunboat is a bet on which chapter of the brand's founding story a given hull comes from. Every boat in this lineup — the 48, 66, 60, and 55 — was built before the company's 2015 bankruptcy and its 2016 sale to Grand Large Yachting, meaning all four predate the French ownership and design regime that followed. What buyers are actually choosing between is which of the brand's three original factories, and which stage of its carbon-construction learning curve, produced their hull.

Which era to target

The 48, built at the original Cape Town, South Africa yard under Morelli & Melvin's design, sits at the oldest end of the range — only a handful were ever completed, hand-laid using an early polyester-and-E-glass vacuum-bagging process before the yard moved decisively toward carbon fiber. The 66, from that same South Africa-built generation, is the largest and most race-proven platform in the lineup, built entirely of carbon. The 60 marks a distinct construction lineage: production moved to a purpose-built China facility from 2010, a more industrialized run than the hand-built early boats, though still years before the French ownership and VPLP design era that followed the 2016 sale. The 55, the newest and last model built under the original company, was designed by Nigel Irens out of the Wanchese, North Carolina yard, with hull and bridge molded as a single carbon unit stiff enough to eliminate the forward crossbeam outright.

Navigating the lineup

The four models split roughly into two buyer categories: the 48 and 66, hand-built during the South Africa years under Morelli & Melvin, and the 60 and 55, built during the brand's China and North Carolina expansion. A buyer chasing the brand's original, lowest-volume boats should look toward the 48 and 66; a buyer wanting the most industrially refined build the independent company ever produced should look toward the 55. The full model directory on this page breaks the range down further by size and year.