Hurley sailboats for sale

Buying a used Hurley: confirm the lineage before you confirm the boat

A used Hurley isn't automatically a Plymouth-built Hurley. The name has been carried by a genuine original builder, by British successor yards working from the original moulds, and by an entirely separate Dutch-built line with no design connection to George Hurley's company at all. That makes a Hurley purchase less about brand reputation on its own and more about tracing which company actually built the specific hull in front of you, since condition and parts support look very different depending on the answer.

Which era to target

Boats from Hurley Marine's own Plymouth run, ending in 1974, come from Ian Anderson's designs and a factory certifying whole classes at once for volume output — this is the line to target for an original build. The closure didn't end it: a firm formed by two of the yard's own former employees put the Hurley 22 back into production the following year and kept it going, and other firms carried the tooling forward into the early 1990s. A wholly separate era runs alongside that story and never touches Plymouth at all: the boats sold as the Hurley 800, 830, and 1050 were built first in Denmark and then in Holland from the late 1970s on, passing through a rotation of Dutch GRP yards — one of them the same shop that built Contest hulls — before the rights eventually settled with a yard near Almere. A badge from this second run is a different boat with a different build history, not a later chapter of the Plymouth one, and worth confirming before comparing it against a British-built Hurley on specification alone.

What to inspect across the range

Hurley's own build notes, from the Hurley Owners Association, flag mast compression and osmosis as recurring problems across the range generally, not confined to a single model — both are worth a specific line item on any survey of an older hull, whichever lineage it comes from.

Navigating the lineup

Size the range by build lineage first, not by length alone: the compact British classes, 18 feet up to the 30/90, run under one production history whether they date to the Plymouth factory itself or to a later firm working the same tooling; the 800, 830, and 1050 sit apart entirely, a Continental line with its own designers and yards. A model number by itself won't tell you which side of that split a listing falls on — the full model directory on this page breaks the range down by year and length once you've settled that question.