Hobie sailboats for sale

Buying a used Hobie: a name that spans a beach toy and a genuine racer

Hobie's badge covers a wider range of boat than the name usually suggests. Most of what's out there is a trailerable beach catamaran built to be rigged solo and launched off sand, but the same maker also produced a short-run trailerable monohull racer and, briefly, a record-chasing hydrofoil trimaran. Condition and completeness of gear matter more than brand cachet here — a well-kept small cat from any era can still be a strong club or family boat, while a stripped or incomplete hull, especially on the rarer models, can be a much bigger project than the price tag suggests.

Which era to target

The core beach cats — the 14 and the 16 — were built with fiberglass/foam-sandwich hulls from their earliest years, a construction method that carried across decades of production; buyers focused on this era are generally shopping structural condition and trampoline/rigging wear rather than a material change. Hobie later moved much of its recreational lineup — the Wave, Getaway, and smaller entries like the Bravo — to a one-piece rotomolded polyethylene hull; Sailing World described the Getaway's hulls as durable enough to "take most any abuse," a fair summary of what draws buyers to that rotomolded family instead of an older cored-fiberglass boat. On the monohull side, the Hobie 33 was built only from 1982 to 1986, and its earlier hulls carried a retractable keel that Practical Sailor described as expensive to produce; the company eventually switched to a fixed keel on its last boats, so a fixed-keel 33 and a retractable-keel 33 are meaningfully different ownership propositions.

What to inspect across the range

On the Hobie 18, the International Hobie Class Association flags several recurring problem areas worth checking on any hull: soft spots in the deck just forward of the rear crossbar where the skipper sits, cracking where the front crossbar attaches to the hull, and water intrusion through the daggerboard trunk seal — most often at the top of the seal rather than the bottom. Early 18s also ran heavier than their advertised weight before the factory addressed stress-point failures with reinforcing shroud anchors at the shrouds and front-crossbar attachment points, so an unmodified early hull is worth a closer structural look. On the Hobie 33, Practical Sailor's owner reports single out a flat bottom that pounds in heavy seas and cockpit seats narrow enough that crew end up sitting on the coaming instead — neither is a defect exactly, but both shape how the boat feels to sail and are worth weighing against a given hull's intended use.

Navigating the lineup

Most buyers will be choosing among sizes within the beach-cat family — the 14, 16, and 18, plus later rotomolded entries like the Wave and Getaway — where size, crew count, and construction era matter more than any single model's reputation. The Hobie 33 sits apart as a genuine monohull racer built in limited numbers, and the TriFoiler apart again as a hydrofoil trimaran discontinued in 1999, both better suited to buyers with a specific project in mind than to someone comparison-shopping the full model directory on this page.