Hanseat sailboats for sale

Buying a used Hanseat: know you're buying a closed shipyard's history, not an active marque

A used Hanseat isn't a model choice within an active, ongoing brand -- it's a boat from Asmus KG Yachtbau, a single German shipyard on the Elbe that built the entire line before winding down in the late 1980s. That changes what "buying a used Hanseat" means in practice: there's no manufacturer to call for parts or history, so each boat's condition and documentation matter more than any assumption drawn from the brand name alone.

Which era to target

The 70 series is the safest place to start, since it's both the best-documented line and the biggest build run: nearly 200 of the 378 total Hanseat units, produced and refined from 1970 to 1981 across four variants -- the base 70 (identifiable by its wooden foot rail), 70B, 70 MKIII, and 70BII. The easiest way to date a 70-series hull within that run is by its skeg: the earliest boats carry one cast from solid iron, a feature the yard phased out entirely on later variants. Outside the 70 series, dating gets harder -- most of Asmus's sixteen types don't have documented year ranges beyond their type name, and the shipyard's own closing date is itself disputed among sources, landing anywhere from 1985 to 1990 depending on the account. Treat any Hanseat as a product of that roughly twenty-year window rather than expecting a precise build year. The Hanseat 33 is the clean exception: a rare model built only from 1979 to 1981, with just six hulls total, one of them a lightened racing version with a 7/8 rig and aluminum tube framing instead of a standard interior.

Navigating the lineup

Most of the sixteen-type Hanseat range -- from the ten-foot Junior dinghy up to the 42-foot slip-rigged 35 MS -- came off Willy Asmus's own board, so size and layout are the main variables between them. A couple of models break that pattern and are worth confirming before treating a listing as typical: the Hanseat 40 was drawn by American designer Doug Peterson, and the Hanseat 33 came from Danish naval architect Kristian Rode rather than Asmus -- a detail easy to miss since the 33's lines otherwise fit the rest of the range. From there, comparing size and type against the full model directory on this page is the fastest way to narrow the field.