PUMA sailboats for sale

Buying a used Puma: know you're buying into a yard's most turbulent chapters

A used Puma is a bet on a boat that outlived at least two corporate crises at the yard that built it. Nao-Glass, the Barcelona-area builder behind the Puma name, went through a late-1970s upheaval that some accounts trace to a management split and others describe as an outright change of ownership, then a second crisis in the 1980s that handed the tooling to a successor company, Astilleros Puma. None of that changes what's under the deck of any one boat, but it does mean treating "Puma" less as a single unbroken production run and more as a lineage that passed through more than one owner before the marque folded in the 1990s.

Which era to target

The earliest Pumas -- the 23, 26, and 34 -- were Holman & Pye's early-1970s IOR designs, drawn to the racing rule of their day. From 1979 the design language shifted to Ron Holland's Puma 27 and Angus Primrose's Puma 29, a design generation removed from the earlier boats. The Puma 34 itself evolved late in its run into the Puma 341, distinguished by a taller, more slender rig and a PVC-sandwich deck aimed at improving stability -- worth knowing when comparing an early Puma 34 against a later 341 built on the same basic hull, which was even briefly offered as a kit. Any Puma built after the yard's 1980s crisis should trace to the successor, Astilleros Puma, rather than the original Nao-Glass operation.

Navigating the lineup

Puma's range ran from pocket IOR racers under 25 feet up to larger cruising designs approaching 45 feet, spanning multiple designers and more than one ownership era rather than one tidy string of sister models. Working from the full model directory on this page, era and designer -- Holman & Pye's early-1970s boats versus the Holland/Primrose generation from 1979 on -- is a more reliable dividing line than model number alone, since a hull like the Puma 34 could turn up as either the original design or the later 341 variant.