McConaghy sailboats for sale

Buying a used McConaghy: know which boat you're actually shopping

Buying a used McConaghy means first figuring out which kind of boat you're actually shopping, because the yard has spent decades building other people's designs alongside its own. A used listing might be a Ker Yacht Design-drawn semi-custom cruising catamaran, an Andrew McDougall-designed foiling dinghy that McConaghy simply manufactured at volume, or a one-off custom racing yacht built to a client's or another naval architect's brief. Condition and construction era matter more here than brand loyalty alone: the yard's reputation rests on composite engineering skill applied across very different categories of boat, not on a single consistent model line the way many production builders operate. A buyer's first question should be which design lineage and category — dinghy, semi-custom cruiser, or custom raceboat — a given listing actually belongs to.

Which era to target

McConaghy's build techniques shifted across the decades, and dating a boat to its era says a lot about what's inside the laminate. Boats from the mid-1970s onward carry the aerospace-inspired carbon layup techniques McConaghy adopted early, while anything built to the 1987 Nomex-cored maxi program or later reflects the vacuum-bagged, sandwich construction the yard engineered with Giovanni Belgrano and SP Systems. High-volume one-design dinghies sit in a narrower window: the Mach2 Moth and the Waszp were built in 2015 and 2016 respectively, per the builder's own production numbers, and buying one means choosing a class-legal boat built to Andrew McDougall's design rather than a bespoke commission. The semi-custom MC-Multihulls cruising catamarans date from after McConaghy's first catamaran launch in February 2018, with Ker Yacht Design as naval architect throughout — boats from this window follow a more standardized, repeatable specification than the yard's earlier custom raceboat work.

Navigating the lineup

Think of a used McConaghy shopping list as three separate categories rather than one continuous range. One-design foiling dinghies — Mach2 and Waszp — are the accessible, class-racing entry point, built to Andrew McDougall's design rather than McConaghy's own. The semi-custom MC-Multihulls cruising catamarans, spanning the MC55 up through the flagship MC115, share Ker Yacht Design naval architecture and a more standardized build than the rest of the range. Everything else — one-off raceboats like the Ker 40+ and older custom yachts built to briefs from Dubois Naval Architects and others — should be evaluated individually rather than assumed to match any pattern; the full model directory on this page breaks out the specific boats and dimensions.