Leisure sailboats for sale

Buying a used Leisure: a small boat with a complicated builder history

A used Leisure is, first, a bet on a genuinely trailerable, small-to-midsize British cruiser - and second, a bet on which builder actually built the hull in front of you. The Leisure name passed through three separate companies over roughly three decades, one of which lost its production records to a fire, so the ordinary condition-versus-price calculation of buying used comes with an extra variable: knowing which era and which builder a given boat came from matters as much as knowing what shape it's in.

Which era to target

Boats from the original Cobramold years, 1967 through the 1980 liquidation, cover the bulk of the range - the 17, 22, 23, 20, 27, and 29 - including the 1975 "SL" wedge-cabin variants of the 17 and 23, sold alongside rather than instead of the earlier hulls. Brinecraft picked up the 17, 20, and 23 moulds after 1980 and built them for a decade until a 1990 fire destroyed the company's own records; boats from this decade carry the same model names as the Cobramold originals but came from a different yard. After the fire, Leisure 17 moulds were rebuilt and production continued under license in Germany and Poland until around 1995 - a distinct, later sub-population worth identifying separately from the earlier UK-built boats. The rarest era by far is the Cory Yachts International-built 18 and 24: very few were completed before the cost of meeting the EU Recreational Craft Directive pushed that builder out of the market, so parts and documentation for these are the hardest to come by.

What to inspect across the range

One issue turns up in the Leisure Owners Association's own history of more than one model: the standard 7.5 hp diesel fitted to both the 27 and the 29 was underpowered from new. Confirm whether a boat has already been repowered, and if not, budget for it rather than assuming the original engine is adequate.

Navigating the lineup

The range spans genuine pocket cruisers meant for towing (the 17, 18, and 20) up through midsize weekenders (the 22 and 23) and larger cruising boats (the 27 and 29), with the Brinecraft-built 26 - built on Oyster Yachts' own moulds rather than a Leisure-designed hull - as a scarce outlier worth treating on its own terms. Matching boat size to how a boat will actually be used, more than chasing a specific model number, is the more useful way to work through the full model directory on this page.