Seastream sailboats for sale

Buying a used Seastream: match the era to the yard, not just the badge

Every Seastream carries the same designer's name, but "Seastream" doesn't describe one yard. For most of the line's life, hulls were laid up by independent subcontractors working to Ian Anderson's plans rather than by Anderson's own crew; a single in-house operation only took over production later in the run. Buying used means treating that construction history - who actually built a given hull, and under what oversight - as seriously as the model name on the transom.

Which era to target

A boat built before the mid-1990s is a Mark I or Mark II hull, and could have come from any of several independent GRP yards working to Anderson's design rather than a single Seastream-run shed: the Hamble's Wilson Manning, Woolston's Southern Boatbuilding Company (joinery on some hulls finished by Rival Yachts), Solent Shipyard on the Itchen, or Camus Marine near Oban. That variety wasn't necessarily a quality gap - the Owners Association's own fleet records document hulls built to Lloyds standards, with construction on at least one boat exceeding Lloyds 100A1 and epoxy coating applied from new - but it does mean two boats of the same model and era can have different build histories worth tracing individually. From the mid-1990s, Anderson brought production in-house at Falmouth and personally supervised the later Mark III hulls, offering more uniform oversight than the subcontracted years produced. A further split followed in 2001, when new ownership under Chris Matthews introduced a Performance range built in epoxy and carbon fibre, a construction method with little in common with the Classic boats' original glassfibre hulls; in practice that range isn't really buyable, since only one 650 was ever completed, so a used-market search realistically means the Classic range.

Navigating the lineup

Seastream's real used-market range is the Classic line - the 34 and 43 that span both build eras, and the larger 445 and 465 that followed. Matching a boat's size band to its era matters more here than chasing a particular model name, since construction history varies more within the range than the model number does; the full model directory on this page is the place to work through the specifics from there.