She sailboats for sale

Buying a used She: one yard, one design house, a single decade

Every She sailboat came from a single Hampshire, England builder, South Hants Engineering, and every hull was drawn by Sparkman & Stephens — there is no cross-shopping between design philosophies or construction standards within the marque, because none existed. That narrowness cuts both ways for a buyer: it removes the era-to-era guesswork that comes with builders who changed hands repeatedly, but it also means the entire fleet is now decades old, built across roughly a ten-year run before the yard folded at the end of the 1970s, squeezed by tighter finances and lower-cost continental builders offering more boat for less money. Buying used She means judging a specific hull's condition and history closely, since there was only ever the one builder behind the badge.

Which era to target

The range spans the SHE 27 and the original SHE 31 from earlier in the yard's run through the SHE C32, the SHE 33, and the SHE 36 built later, closer to the company's close. Later hulls like the SHE 33 Sophie (1979) and the SHE 36 Water Bear (1978) came off the line as the yard's finances were most strained, so weigh the individual boat's condition and maintenance record more heavily than which year it carries. Anyone specifically hunting a SHE 31 should also widen the search: that hull's tooling passed to Laird Adams after South Hants closed, and a related boat turns up in the record as the Delta 94 — worth checking if a plain "She 31" search comes up short.

Navigating the lineup

Sizes run from the 26-foot SHE 27 up to the 35.5-foot SHE 36, all sharing the same Hampshire builder and design house, so size and role are a more useful filter than construction quality. The SHE 31 and 9.5 Traveller sit in the middle of the range as the marque's most cruising-oriented pairing, while the SHE 36 — also built under licence in Britain on the same Sparkman & Stephens design that became the Hughes 35 — carries the most distinct pedigree in the lineup. The full model directory on this page is the place to compare sizes and years directly.