Spindrift sailboats for sale

Buying a used Spindrift: know which one you're getting

A boat listed as a "Spindrift" carries a name, not a pedigree. Unrelated builders on two continents put it on entirely different boats, so the usual shortcut of judging a used sailboat by its brand reputation and build era doesn't apply here — condition and, more importantly, which lineage a given hull belongs to matter far more than the name on the transom.

Which Spindrift you're looking at

A boat with a hull number in the low 4000s, built on the O'Day Mariner's own molds, is a Rebel Industries "Spindrift One Design" from 1980 or later — one of just 78 built. A Spindrift 22 or 19 traces to Jim Taylor's Spectrum 22 and Starwind 19 designs, also built by Rebel Industries in Florida in low volume; probably fewer than 50 of the 22 were made. A Spindrift 13 is a different animal altogether: a marine-plywood dinghy dating to 1963 from Ontario's Vandestadt & McGruer, unrelated to either Florida boat. Larger Spindrift cutters built in Taiwan are a fourth branch entirely, and a far less documented one — the design and tooling history behind them isn't established in any authoritative source.

What to inspect across the range

The clearest documented caution applies to the Rebel Industries boats: according to designer Jim Taylor, whose own Spectrum 22 design became the Spindrift 22, Rebel built these hulls from tooling designed for other boats and never paid for the rights to do so, and the resulting Spindrift-badged boats were not a single consistent product. The Spindrift Mariner carries its own specific flag — the Mariner Class Association's own officers disputed the class legitimacy of its factory-built boats immediately after one won the 1981 Nationals, retroactively revoking its measurement certificate.

Navigating the lineup

Because these lineages share no parts, no class association, and no design lineage, the model number and hull-number range in a listing matter more than the brand name on it. The full model directory on this page breaks out each of these lines individually, so cross-check any "Spindrift" listing against it before comparing the boat to others carrying the same name.