MacWester sailboats for sale

Buying a used Macwester: know which builder actually built the hull

A Macwester wasn't necessarily built by Macwester Marine. Jim Roy's original company built the range from 1964 until it sold the current lineup's manufacturing rights to Trident Marine Company Ltd in 1979, and individual model tooling had already started moving to other yards before that — Atlanta Marine, Bull and Co, and eventually Mariners Boatyard among them. That makes provenance, not just model number, the first thing to establish: two boats with the same name can come from different factories, different years, and different construction runs.

Which era to target

The Roy-era boats — built by Macwester Marine itself between 1964 and 1979 — are the original design lineage, consolidated by the late 1970s into four core types: the Rowan, the Macwester 27, the Wight/Malin class, and the Seaforth. Trident Marine of Fareham took over that lineup's manufacture after 1979 and kept it in production for years afterward, revising the 27's deck and interior for a Series IV in 1981 and, on late examples of the Seaforth, swapping in Volvo 65hp MD30 diesel power before the whole run ended around 1985 — so a boat's exact age matters as much as its model name for knowing what's under the hatches. Buyers should also expect to encounter tooling-derived cousins that aren't Macwesters at all in name — Atlanta's Rockall and Viking-based Broads Sailor share hulls or moulds with the Macwester 26 and 28 but were sold, and should be treated, as a different maker's product.

Navigating the lineup

Sort by builder and era before sorting by length: Macwester Marine's own run spans the 15-foot Kelpie up through the 36-foot Seaforth, while the same model names continued — sometimes with revised decks or interiors — under Trident after 1979. The Wight family's bilge-keel construction and the Rowan-to-Rowan-Crown transition are useful signposts for where a given hull sits in that timeline; the full model directory on this page breaks the range down further by year and length.