Sundeer sailboats for sale

Buying a used Sundeer: a scarce production run built for two people crossing oceans

A used Sundeer means shopping one of the smallest true production runs in bluewater cruising. The Dashews put the 56, 60, and 64 into series production at a single composites yard across a closed five-year run that, in sailing writer Charles Doane's own words, produced too few boats for how good they turned out to be — the only line the Dashews ever built at production scale rather than boat by boat. That scarcity works in a buyer's favor in one sense: a Sundeer coming to market is worth taking seriously, engineered from the outset, like every other Dashew design, to be sailed short-handed across oceans rather than around a bay. But production closed in 1999, and on a hull that old, its individual maintenance history counts for more than the Dashew name alone.

Which era to target

Every Sundeer comes from the same closed production window, 1994 to 1999, built at TPI using the same resin-infused hull layup throughout, so there is no meaningfully different generation to weigh one year against another within the run itself. The real decision sits upstream of Sundeer altogether: the Dashews' earlier Deerfoot yachts were built in fiberglass and aluminum on a sporadic basis at several different yards, not to the single, repeatable production standard Sundeer represents, so a Deerfoot on the used market is a different proposition than any of the three Sundeer hulls.

Navigating the lineup

Within the three hulls, the split that matters is rig and size, not era. Two of them, the 56 and 60, come off the same tooling under a cutter rig, distinguished only by four feet of extra lazarette length on the 60; the 64 carries a ketch rig and more overall length. Marine journalist Charles Doane singled out the 56 and 60 as the closer match to Dashew's original design intent. The full model directory on this page breaks out the differences among all three.