Lippincott sailboats for sale

Buying a used Lippincott: provenance you can actually trace

A used Lippincott is not one kind of boat, and knowing which kind you're looking at matters before anything else. The name covers one-design racing classes the Riverton, New Jersey, yard built to someone else's design — Lightnings, Comets, Stars, and the Duster — and a small run of cruising keelboats, the 30 and the 36, designed in-house a generation later. Buying either kind means buying from a family yard with a traceable, documented history rather than an orphan brand: Lippincott Boat Works was founded in 1946 by brothers Howard and Robert Lippincott and ran continuously in Riverton until 1985. But the two kinds of boat are different purchases — a Merrill-designed Duster that Lippincott happened to build to class standard is not the same thing as a Lippincott-designed 30 or 36, and a listing that just says "Lippincott" won't tell you which you're getting.

Which era to target

Lippincott Boat Works made the shift from wood to fiberglass earlier than many one-design builders of its era, and the switch is documented well enough to be useful for dating a boat. The proving ground was the Star class: converting that design to fiberglass posed problems serious enough that two other builders who separately tried it afterward abandoned the attempt and stopped building Stars, while Lippincott's conversion held — a useful marker for placing a wood-built one-design against a later fiberglass example within the same class. On the cruising side, the era question is simpler: the 30 arrived in 1979 and stayed in production into the mid-1980s, with fewer than 100 built, while the 36 followed in 1985, the company's final year. Both post-date the racing one-designs by decades, so a Lippincott keelboat and a Lippincott-built dinghy are never contemporaries of each other — one belongs to the founding-era wood-to-fiberglass transition, the other to the company's last decade.

What to inspect across the range

The 30 is the best-documented model for condition. A Spinsheet used-boat review found the hand-laid fiberglass hull, balsa-cored deck and cabin structures, and plywood bulkheads bonded with fiberglass cloth and resin generally holding up well — serious structural or deck problems are not typical, and the reviewer had not encountered extreme osmotic blistering. The same review flagged two narrower items worth a survey's attention: flat washers rather than backing plates at deck-hardware attachment points, and an anchor locker shaped in a way that won't accommodate a plow-type anchor. Because every 30 was built before vinylester resin was standard for exterior finishes, some elevated moisture below the waterline is common and not by itself a red flag.

Navigating the lineup

The one-design classes and the two cruising keelboats aren't really a single lineup to weigh against each other — a buyer wants a Lightning, Comet, Star, or Duster for class racing, and a 30 or 36 for cruising, and that choice is about the type more than the builder. Within the cruisers, the 30 is the far better-documented of the two and the one a survey has more precedent to check against; the 36 arrived the same year the company closed, with less of a paper trail behind it. The full model directory on this page breaks out each model by year and length.