Oceanic sailboats for sale

Buying a used Oceanic: place the hull before judging it

A used "Oceanic" listing can point to either of two unconnected design lineages that happen to share a name. One is Bill O'Brien's British motorsailer and catamaran work; the other is Ted Brewer's steel-and-glass cruising line, credited on Brewer's own site under the fuller name "Pan Oceanic." Before weighing condition, a buyer needs to work out which lineage a given hull belongs to, since construction approach and era both follow from that answer rather than from the name on the transom.

Which era to target

O'Brien's side of the name runs through his British multihull-pioneer career: after drawing the Jumpahead catamaran class in 1946 and launching it as a class in the 1950s with support he sought from the Prout family, he moved through the production Shamrock and Bobcat catamarans before his board produced the GRP Oceanic 30-foot motorsailer, part of the same 1960s-70s stretch that produced the individually named catamaran Oceanic Anneliese -- the boat that carried the Swale family around the world via Cape Horn between 1971 and 1974. Brewer's Pan Oceanic line follows decades later, with cruisers in the 38- to 46-foot range dating from the early 1980s into 1986 and built to a heavier offshore brief than O'Brien's motorsailer and catamarans. A smaller, older hull belongs to O'Brien's era; a larger one from the early-to-mid 1980s carries Brewer's design credit under the shortened "Oceanic" name.

Navigating the lineup

Because the two eras sit at different ends of the size range and serve different purposes -- a small motorsailer or catamaran versus a larger offshore cruiser -- hull size and type are the fastest way to sort a listing before anything else. Confirming which lineage a boat belongs to first keeps a buyer from mixing up two unrelated designs that happen to share a name, and it's a faster check than working backward from the full model directory on this page.