Rival sailboats for sale

Buying a used Rival: matching hull era to what you actually want from a passage-maker

A used Rival is largely a bet on one designer's construction habits rather than on which company happened to own the yard when a given hull left the mould. Peter Brett drew the entire original range on a single hull-lamination method — solid fibreglass, laid up by hand, on every model from the 31 through the 36 — so material risk changes less by model year than on most brands. Where real variation creeps in is completion path: Southern Boatbuilding fitted out the boats Brett sold directly, but Marine Construction separately kept the right to sell Rival 32 mouldings for home completion even after Brett stepped back from the business side, so a given 32's finish quality can trace to a different builder, or no professional builder at all, depending on which route it took to the water. That's worth establishing before anything else on a prospective purchase.

Which era to target

The Rival 31 is the one model where hull number matters as much as model year: Brett reworked the mould for the second boat off the line, in 1968, to bring the rudder stock up vertically inside the hull, curing a heavy-helm problem the very first hull had shown and leaving every 31 built after it markedly easier to steer. A buyer looking at a 31 should find out which side of that change theirs falls on. The Rival 32 that came next wasn't a response to that fix — it was an unrelated project, a new mould with a short counter added, arriving only years later — and that mould was itself reworked in 1975 with a fresh interior, so a late 32 (the so-called "Mark III") and an early one aren't quite the same boat inside. Later in the line, the Rival 34 traded the 32's shape for a deepened afterbody that Southampton University tank testing measured at roughly 6 percent less resistance, plus longer overhangs added for windward manners and looks rather than speed — a real performance step up, not just a longer waterline.

What to inspect across the range

Yachting Monthly's review of the Rival 34 recommends a thorough survey before buying — covering engine, rigging, sails, winches, electronics, and the other components that are expensive to replace — and that advice travels across the range given the shared hand-laid construction. The same review notes that a secondhand Rival 34 will typically be an older boat by the time it changes hands, which is really the underlying reason the survey matters: solid GRP built to Lloyd's 100A1 standards holds up well, but decades of hardware, rigging, and systems wear don't stop just because the hull does.

Navigating the lineup

Hull size is the simplest way to sort the range: the 31 and 32 are the smallest and earliest pair, the 34 and 38 sit in the middle as aft-cockpit cruisers, and the 41 is the largest of Brett's designs, most often found as a centre-cockpit ketch. Rather than chasing a specific model year, buyers are better served narrowing by that size band and cockpit layout first, then working through the full model directory on this page to compare individual listings within it.