Southerly sailboats for sale

Buying a used Southerly: a swing-keel design that has outlived four builders

Buying a used Southerly means buying a swing-keel design as much as a specific boat, and more than with most brands it means knowing which company actually built the hull in front of you. The name has come off Northshore's original Chichester yard, then Southerly Yachts on the same site, Discovery Yacht Group's Marchwood facility, a short hand-built run from Ocean Shipyard, and now Concept Yachts, also at Marchwood — several changes of builder across five decades. None of that changes the reason buyers seek the brand out in the first place: a keel that retracts for skinny water and lets the boat settle upright on a drying mooring, then extends again for open water. It does change what buying used actually involves — who still holds the moulds and drawings for a given era, who can service a decades-old keel mechanism, and how consistent the finish and quality control were at the point a specific hull left whichever yard built it.

Which era to target

Treat the ownership changes as construction eras, not just corporate trivia. Boats from the original Dick Carter design era were built around a single rudder and a keel profile aimed at shoal draft over outright pace; buyers chasing more performance should look toward the dual-rudder boats that followed Rob Humphreys' 2003 keel redesign, since that generation was built with a different sailing brief in mind. Boats built during Discovery's 2017–2022 run were finished to a noticeably different standard than the Northshore-built boats that came before them, but with the shipyard itself gone, parts and service continuity for that specific era now runs through whatever successor holds the tooling rather than the original builder. The current Concept Yachts build, underway since 2023, leans harder on infused lamination and computer-milled, 3D-printed fit-out than the hand-finished eras before it — worth knowing if a newer boat's finish is being weighed against an older hull.

What to inspect across the range

The swing keel is the recurring inspection point across the whole lineup, not just one model. Reviewers describe the cast-iron keel and grounding-plate system as generally needing service every five to ten years, since rust will eventually work through the primer and barrier coats if it's neglected, and the keel mechanism itself needs regular lubrication. Various Southerly models have also seen GRP keel-box failures: in poor weather the corners of the GRP can work into the box, and a heavy grounding can detach the bonding of the framework that supports it in the bilge, so the box and surrounding structure are worth close attention on survey alongside the keel itself. Gelcoat is a second recurring theme — colored gelcoat, including a light-blue option offered on some boats, has been reported to fade and craze faster than white, and crazing near the hull-to-deck joint turns up on later models too. Where a boat has teak decks, check them for wear and for water-tightness at the fastenings, and budget for moisture ingress around mast wiring glands and jib-track anchor points to be a common survey finding.

Navigating the lineup

Southerly's range runs from a 28-footer that started the marque in the mid-1970s up to flagship cruisers over 55 feet, so size and era matter more than chasing a specific model number — the same swing-keel identity and, broadly, the same design lineage run through boats built five decades apart. Treat the builder era discussed above and the size band actually needed as the two real filters, then use the full model directory on this page to compare specific years and lengths within that range.