Marieholm sailboats for sale

Buying a used Marieholm: rarity and unsettled records matter as much as condition

A used Marieholm is, first, an old boat from a yard whose own paperwork is unsettled: a national maritime museum's structured record and a county museum's own account disagree by roughly a decade on when the works actually stopped building fiberglass boats, and the builder's name changed somewhere along the way -- boat records credit an early-1980s model to "Marieholm Plast AB," a different company name than the "Marieholms Bruk AB" tied to the earlier motorsailer line. A buyer chasing a specific hull should weigh actual condition and documented provenance over any assumption about which company, or which decade, built it. The gap makes sense once you know the boatyard was a late add-on at an old industrial site that had spent generations making unrelated hardware -- reason enough not to expect a deep bench of surviving company records or dealer history behind any single hull.

Which era to target

Marieholm's boatbuilding era opened in 1956, after decades making agricultural machinery, but the boats worth targeting are the later fiberglass generation -- the International Folkboat lineage and the small motorsailer and coastal-cruiser hulls that followed it. Because the shipyard's closing years are themselves in dispute, and because at least one later model carries a different builder name than the earlier ones, confirming which entity actually built a prospective 1980s-era hull is worth doing before anything else.

Navigating the lineup

The IF stands apart: Tord Sundén's fiberglass adaptation of the Nordic Folkboat, with a larger interior and rig than the original and a smooth, non-lapstrake hull that carried a flock of them into 1970s Annapolis PHRF racing -- it is the model most buyers come to Marieholm looking for. Smaller and rarer hulls sit alongside it, including a several-hundred-built early-1970s motorsailer and a far scarcer early-1980s model with fewer than 100 built; the full model directory on this page sorts the range by size and year for buyers weighing the IF's pedigree against the yard's smaller, less common hulls.