Kettenburg sailboats for sale

Buying a used Kettenburg: two boats sharing one name

Two different boats share the Kettenburg name, built by the same San Diego yard a generation apart, and knowing which one is which matters more to a buyer than the badge does. The yard that built both - family-run through 1952, then partnership-owned, then twice sold before closing for good in 1993 - no longer exists to answer questions about either line, so everything a buyer needs has to come from the boat's own documented history and the era it belongs to. A used Kettenburg is really two separate used-boat searches wearing one name.

Which era to target

The Pacific Class carries its own internal split worth knowing before comparing two PCs against each other: early hulls, built upright in the traditional manner starting in 1929, differ from the ones built after the war, when the yard turned to production methods and began building PC hulls upside-down on a jig for speed - a shift in how the boat was put together, not a change to the one-design rule itself. That line closed out in the late 1950s. Everything from the K-38 onward is a different design team's work entirely: Paul Kettenburg and Charlie Underwood, building in mahogany-on-oak carvel construction, a method the yard held to consistently through the K-40 that followed it. The K-38 launched in 1949, three years before George Kettenburg Jr.'s 1952 death ended his involvement with the yard; the K-40, K-41, K-46, and K-50 all came later, extending the same postwar partnership's design language further. Choosing between a Pacific Class and a K-boat means choosing between two different design teams working two decades apart, not two trims of one product - and choosing between an early and late PC means asking how that specific hull was actually built.

Navigating the lineup

The Pacific Class sits at the smaller end and closest to a true racing one-design - a boat built to a fixed class rule rather than sold as a cruiser. The K-series scales up from there, with the K-38 as the design that started the postwar line and the larger K-boats extending the same partnership's work into bigger cruising hulls. A buyer set on the one-design racing experience should look to the PC; a buyer wanting a bigger, cruising-capable boat from the same yard should look to the K-series, where the full model directory on this page breaks down the range hull by hull.