Little Harbor sailboats for sale

Buying a used Little Harbor: a sailor-designed boat built by hand, across three very different production eras

A used Little Harbor is not a single, consistent product the way a high-volume production boat is — it's a semi-custom yacht that Ted Hood, its founder and principal naval architect, was personally involved in designing and building anywhere from 38 to 78 feet, constructed at different times in Marblehead, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond. That variation means the brand name alone doesn't tell a buyer as much as it would for a mass builder: which yard actually built a given hull, and in which era, matters as much as the model number on the transom. Buying well means treating each hull as its own case rather than assuming consistency across four decades of construction.

Which era to target

Little Harbor's build locations shifted more than once. Hood had already built boats in Japan and Holland before starting construction in Taiwan in 1979, a relationship that lasted 14 years before production moved on to Singapore, Turkey, Poland and China; the 38, for example, was typically built in Taiwan by Lien Hwa or a similar yard under Hood's direct oversight. The 1986 move of Hood's operations to Portsmouth, Rhode Island — where a former WWII navy fuel depot became one of the largest yacht service, design and building complexes on the East Coast — marked another shift in scale. Buyers should also weigh ownership era: boats sold under Hood's direct ownership predate the 1999-2001 change in hands that eventually led Ted Fontaine to found his own independent design firm, a dividing line worth knowing when researching a given hull's design and construction lineage.

What to inspect across the range

Cored construction shows up repeatedly in the range: reviews of both the 46 and the 53 describe Airex-cored hulls and Divinycell-cored decks, chosen, per SpinSheet's review of the 46, for sound and thermal insulation rather than to save weight. Cored hulls and decks reward a careful moisture survey regardless of model, since coring integrity is the main long-term risk that construction choice carries. On the 53 specifically, boats.com's Perry Design Review flagged the rudderstock as intruding on the head of the aft berth — worth checking in person on that model, since it's a documented layout quirk rather than a universal one.

Navigating the lineup

The range runs from early, smaller boats like the 37 and 38 through a concentrated run of 40- to 55-foot cruisers built during the Hood-Fontaine partnership's most productive years, up to flagship-sized yachts in the 60-foot class built later in the 1980s and '90s. Buyers focused on an early, US- or Taiwan-built hull and those chasing a larger, later-era flagship are shopping genuinely different boats under the same name. The full model directory on this page breaks down specific models, years and sizes to help narrow that search.