Open sailboats for sale

Buying a used Open: a class, not a brand

A listing filed under the make "Open" is not describing one company's used boat -- it is describing a one-design class boat, either the Open 5.70 or its smaller sibling the Open 5.00, drawn by the French design office Groupe Finot and produced by more than one yard. The design authority is settled and singular: Groupe Finot, credited by name in the boat's own manufacturer material and independently by Sailing World. The build origin is not as settled: Phileas Boats of Rochefort, France is the principal and best-documented builder, but a second builder, Columbia Yachts in the USA, is also on record. That means build origin is worth verifying from the specific boat's own papers rather than assuming it from the make field on a listing.

Which builder to target

Both recorded builders worked from the same Groupe Finot design, so the useful buyer question isn't which drawing a hull follows -- it's which yard actually built it. Phileas Boats, the originating French builder, is the only one of the two with first-party manufacturer documentation describing construction and specification in detail. Columbia Yachts' USA-built boats are documented on Latitude 38's authority alone, without detail on how the two builders' output compares; a buyer working from a USA-built hull should treat that gap as a reason to ask the seller more questions, not fewer. Production of both models sits in a tight window either side of the turn of the millennium -- the 5.00 in 2000, the 5.70 in 2002 -- so this is a builder question more than an era question; there is no documented mid-run design change to date a hull against.

What to inspect across the range

Both models share a fiberglass build worth understanding before a survey. The 5.70's hull is a foam-cored, molded fiberglass-reinforced-polyester structure, stiffened by a large fixed longitudinal member joining deck to hull, with a 15mm PVC foam-core deck and a glass-injected fin ballast carrying a 150-kilogram lead bulb -- details that point a surveyor toward where core saturation or delamination would show up on an older hull. The 5.00 instead uses a polyester hull and deck with an internal stiffening structure rather than a cored sandwich, a single lifting rudder, and a deep, rotating 95-kilogram keel that the builder describes as sized for safety and designed to retract for beaching or trailer recovery -- worth cycling and inspecting on any 5.00 under consideration. One detail is genuinely useful for anyone budgeting for parts: the 5.70 carries the same rotating mast and boom as the Hobie Tiger catamaran, a high-volume rig chosen specifically to keep replacement spars easy to find -- real parts commonality that matters more on a small one-design class than on a mainstream production cruiser.

Navigating the lineup

The lineup itself is short and easy to place: the 5.70 came first and built the class's public identity, including Sailing World naming it its 2007 One-Design of the Year, while the 5.00 followed as a smaller, more accessible family boat pitched at a crew of three. Beyond size, Sailing World also reports a class-rule weight limit of 573 pounds, which caps what either boat can legitimately carry into one-design competition -- a constraint that shapes what a boat can legitimately be, not just how it is optioned. Use the full model directory on this page to compare the two models directly rather than assuming "Open" alone tells you which one, or which builder, is on offer.