Saturna sailboats for sale

Buying a used Saturna: confirm the builder before judging the boat

A "Saturna" listing could be either of two boats that have nothing in common but a name. One is the Saturna 33, a British Columbia-built pilothouse cruiser dating to the late 1970s and 1980s; the other is a much larger, Taiwan-built Saturn cruiser from decades later that sometimes gets listed with a trailing "a" its real name doesn't carry. Sorting out which one is actually for sale — the model number does this — comes before any judgment about era or condition.

Which era to target

Saturna 33 hulls trace to a design first built in 1977 as the Truant 33 on a British Columbia molds run, sold to Saturna Yachts in 1981 and continued there through the 1980s, with a separate, briefer California production run in the same window — a hull's age places it somewhere in that roughly decade-long stretch, whichever coast it came from. The Saturn range belongs to a different generation entirely: Bill Dixon's custom bluewater cruisers, built by Ta Yang in Taiwan across sizes from 44 to 55 feet, came together after Roger Burroughs founded the company, with a UK and European sales agency signed on in 2015. A boat from this side of the name is a markedly newer, and considerably larger, build than anything wearing the Saturna 33's badge.

Navigating the lineup

The two lineages don't overlap in size or purpose, so the real choice isn't between them but about which kind of boat is wanted: a smaller, vintage pilothouse cruiser built to a single William Garden design and offered with or without that pilothouse, or a larger, custom offshore cruiser from a Dixon-and-Ta-Yang partnership formed decades later. Buyers should let that distinction, not the shared name, set expectations for size, era, and construction before comparing individual boats — the full model directory on this page separates the two by model number for a closer look.