Passport sailboats for sale

Buying a used Passport: a small builder's ocean-passage pedigree, split across two very different building eras

A used Passport is a bet on a specific era of the brand as much as on the boat itself. These were never high-volume production boats — Passport Yachts Inc. built them first out of a succession of small Taiwan yards, then, from 2000 on, at a dedicated facility on Xiamen Island, China, under the same Annapolis-based ownership throughout. That continuity of ownership and design intent — bluewater passagemaking rather than coastal daysailing — carries across both eras, but the yards, materials, and detailing that produced any individual hull did not stay fixed, so knowing which chapter built a given boat matters more than it would with a larger, more standardized production builder.

Which era to target

Boats built before 2000 came out of Taiwan, where Passport moved among several different yards over the years — the Passport 42, for instance, was built first at Solar Marine, then Miracle Marine, then Hai Yang Boat Building, all within less than a decade of production. Hulls from this era are solid fiberglass throughout, but even within a single model's run the deck coring wasn't fixed: the 40, for example, started with marine plywood underfoot and moved to Airex foam in later hulls. Boats built from 2000 on came out of the newer Xiamen facility, where the Classic and Vista-series lines spec closed-cell foam throughout the deck — none of the wood coring found in earlier boats — with hardware bolted through stainless plates rather than screwed in place. Within the Vista series itself, the smaller 515 had a short production run and is genuinely scarce on the used market, while the larger twin-cockpit 585 and 615 came later still.

What to inspect across the range

On pre-2000, Taiwan-built boats, Good Old Boat flags glassed-in chainplates as a real concern: many owners have since dug theirs out and replaced them, a big job, because glassing over stainless steel invites crevice corrosion that can't be inspected from outside. The same era's teak deck-screw bungs are worth checking too — deteriorated caulking there lets water migrate into the deck core and can leave the deck feeling spongy underfoot. Freshwater and blackwater tanks are another area with a documented history of leaks and cracks on early boats. On the newer Xiamen-built Vista boats, SpinSheet's inspection turned up tight generator and engine-room access — checking the oil on a Fischer Panda unit took real effort behind the sound shield — along with isolated corrosion on under-protected underwater hardware on more than one boat inspected; both are worth a close look on any Vista candidate. On the plus side, Sailing Magazine found that blistering has not proven to be much of a problem even on Passport 40s that spent years sailing in the tropics.

Navigating the lineup

The range splits naturally into the smaller, more affordable Taiwan-era 40s and 42s built for a couple to manage themselves, and the larger, later Xiamen-built Vista twin-cockpits designed for extended world cruising with more systems and complexity to maintain. Let intended use and crew size set the size band first, then compare individual boats within that band on the full model directory on this page.