Mirage sailboats for sale

Buying a used Mirage: confirm which builder made it before anything else

A boat listed simply as a "Mirage" could be one of two very different things: a Canadian cruiser or racer-cruiser from Mirage Yachts Limited, the Pointe-Claire, Quebec company that built the great majority of Mirage-branded sailboats between 1972 and 1989, or a much rarer sailboat from Mirage Manufacturing, a separate Gainesville, Florida yard that built its own small run of racing designs under the same name before moving into trawler-yacht production. The two companies shared no ownership and built no boats together, so the model name alone won't settle which one built a given hull — matching a boat to its actual builder, and by extension its actual design and construction history, is the first job before evaluating condition.

Which era to target

The Quebec-built side of the range starts with the company's founding flagship, a smaller, racing-oriented design meant to compete directly with C&C Yachts, and runs through a decade-plus of larger Robert Perry cruiser designs that carried the yard through to its 1989 close. A boat from that later Perry era — sold as a family cruiser rather than a stripped-down racer — will handle differently than the company's earlier, racing-bred hulls, so a buyer's first filter should be roughly when a given boat was built, not just its length overall. The Florida-built side is a separate, narrower story: Mirage Manufacturing's sailboat work centers on a trailerable Mini Ton class racer built between 1975 and 1983, a design purpose-built for one-design offshore-rule racing rather than family cruising, so buyers should expect a boat built to those priorities rather than the Quebec yard's later cruising-oriented models.

Navigating the lineup

Within the Quebec-built side, the range runs from Bruce Kirby's one-design Kirby 25 racer up through Robert Perry's larger family cruisers, so a buyer chasing a dedicated racer and a buyer chasing coastal-cruising space are really shopping different corners of the same builder's output. The Florida-built side is effectively a single racer, the Mirage 5.5, plus a couple of Bruce Kelley-designed models built at the same yard — a much smaller pool overall. Once a builder and an era are settled, the full model directory on this page is the place to compare specific lengths and layouts.