Santa Cruz sailboats for sale

Buying a used Santa Cruz: two companies under one racing reputation

A used Santa Cruz is a boat from one of two distinct builders sharing a name and a reputation for speed. Bill Lee's yard designed and built the line through his 1995 sale of the company, and ownership shifted hands repeatedly through the years that followed before an Australian-led team took over in January 2008 with new ownership, management, and materials. That 2008 turn wasn't just a change of address — it brought a different designer and a different primary build material to the range. A buyer weighing a Santa Cruz on brand reputation alone risks conflating two builders with genuinely different engineering choices behind the same three letters on the transom.

Which era to target

The clean dividing line is 1995 forward, though the sharper construction break falls at 2008. Boats from Bill Lee's era — the 27 through the 70, designed and built between 1974 and Lee's exit — were fiberglass, hand-laminated over cores such as balsa, in the racing-sled tradition Lee pioneered with Merlin. After the 2008 change in ownership, fiberglass gave way to carbon fiber as the yard's primary build material, a shift embodied in Tim Kernan's Santa Cruz 37, whose keel-and-rig-load-bearing frame was resin-infused and carbon-reinforced to cut weight without sacrificing structural strength, unlike the fiberglass builds that came before it. Buyers should also know that production moved from Santa Cruz, California to Jacksonville Beach, Florida after the 2008 changeover, so a boat's build location is itself a marker of which era, and which ownership, produced it.

Navigating the lineup

Lee's classic run spans a wide size band, anchored at the small end by the 27-footer that launched the line in 1974 and at the large end by the 70; the 52, a Sailing World Boat of the Year pick, sits toward the top of that range and is worth weighing against the 50 and 70 for buyers focused on the bigger boats. The Santa Cruz 37 stands apart as the sole entry from the post-2008 Kernan generation, built to a different construction standard than anything in the Lee-designed range, so it's worth treating as its own category rather than comparing it size-for-size against the older boats. The full model directory on this page breaks out the complete range for closer comparison.