San Juan sailboats for sale

Buying a used San Juan: knowing which hand drew the boat

A used San Juan is either an in-house Don Clark design or one of a small number of outside commissions, and that distinction matters more for a buyer than it would for most single-designer brands. Most of the lineup came from one hand working inside a family business, which gives those hulls a consistent design approach across two decades. The exceptions are worth knowing before you shop: Bruce Kirby, the Laser's designer, drew the line's most significant keelboat under a specific racing-rule brief, and at least two other models arrived by way of outside molds or a different design credit entirely. None of this is current production - the Clark Boat Company's run ended in 1984, and its successor was gone by 1988 - so every used San Juan is a decades-old hull where condition and documentation matter more than the badge alone.

Which era to target

The San Juan 21 anchors the early, purely in-house era: a trailerable keel/centerboarder that Don Clark designed himself and that the yard turned out in numbers large enough that parts knowledge and community support are easier to find here than almost anywhere else in the range. The San Juan 24 opens a different era: designed outside the family by Bruce Kirby specifically for the IOR Quarter Ton class, under a brief limiting draft to four feet and beam to eight, it's a racing-rule boat first, and Kirby's later half-tonner, the San Juan 30, sits in the same commissioned, rule-driven camp. The mid-1970s in-house expansion - the 26, the shoal-keel/centerboard 23, and the 28 - broadened the range toward more conventional cruising, and the 28 has a wrinkle worth checking on a listing: its near-twin, the 29, came off the successor company's line with only cosmetic changes, so the two are effectively interchangeable except for which builder's plate is on the boat. At the top of the range, the last few years brought the smallest production runs and the thinnest paper trail: the San Juan 34, whose design traces back through a Crown 34 predecessor and a mild Dave Clark rework rather than a clean in-house job; the San Juan 33, built for just two seasons and barely documented since; and the 33S, which carries a David Pedrick design credit under a different name entirely and may turn up cross-listed because of it.

What to inspect across the range

The San Juan 21's swing-keel trunk is the range's best-documented inspection point: a leaking trunk can let water into the surrounding core, and owner and forum accounts repeatedly single out the keel trunk and swing-keel hardware as the model's most persistent long-term maintenance item, alongside micro-cracking where a swing keel slaps in rough conditions. Because Clark decks were balsa-cored rather than solid glass fleet-wide, the same core-and-hardware scrutiny - especially around chainplates and other high-load fittings - is worth carrying to any other Clark-era deck, even where no single documented issue has surfaced boat by boat the way it has on the 21.

Navigating the lineup

The range runs from the small, trailerable 21 through Kirby's midsize IOR-bred racer-cruisers to the larger, scarcer late-1970s and early-1980s boats at the top end. A buyer who wants the deepest parts and owner-community support should look toward the 21 and 24; one drawn to more interior room should expect the later, larger models to come with fewer surviving examples and less documented history to lean on. The full model directory on this page breaks out every size and production year.