Tanton sailboats for sale

Buying a used Tanton: an owner-built and semi-custom hull, not a factory brand

A used Tanton listing is a boat built to Yves-Marie Tanton's design, not a boat that came off one consistent production line. His boats have gone up in dozens of yards and owner-built sheds across 40 countries — commercial builders working from his drawings alongside amateur builders, including French civil servants who welded up his steel, constant-angle hull designs during off-duty hours in overseas postings. That spread means condition and finish quality ride on the individual hull and its builder far more than on the Tanton name alone, so a survey has to do more work here than it would on a boat from a single production yard.

Which era to target

Tanton's design work splits roughly into two eras. His IOR period through the 1970s produced raceboats built at Branton Yachts in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, working in the Gougeon Brothers' wood-and-epoxy WEST System from 1976 onward, and carrying carbon-fiber spars — filament-wound, as early as 1979, on equipment otherwise built for Department of Defense missile nose cones — on cat-ketch designs like the 43. His later cruising designs, including the 43 and 45, moved to fiberglass construction with a balsa core; boats.com reported that the 45's drawings were fully approved by the American Bureau of Shipping under its 1986 offshore-racing yacht guide. Treat those two eras — early wood-epoxy raceboats versus later ABS-classed fiberglass cruisers — as different propositions with different inspection priorities.

What to inspect across the range

Cruising World's review of the Tanton 43 and boats.com's profile of the Tanton 45 both describe balsa-cored construction paired with a teak deck: solid fiberglass below the waterline and balsa-cored above it on the 43, with teak laid directly onto that balsa-cored deck, while the 45's builder substituted marine plywood for balsa immediately around hardware installations. That combination makes moisture intrusion into the balsa core under deck hardware and fittings the first thing worth chasing on a survey. boats.com also reported that ballast on the 45 is cast iron and fully encapsulated rather than through-bolted, which removes keel bolts as a maintenance item but can make keel damage or grounding history harder to assess without cutting into the encapsulation. Because construction quality varies by individual builder rather than by a factory standard, a documented survey or repair history for a specific hull is worth more than its model name alone.

Navigating the lineup

Within that spread, the choice comes down to type as much as size: an IOR-era raceboat built in wood-epoxy, a cat-ketch cruiser like the 43 or 45 built later in fiberglass, or an owner-built steel one-off. The full model directory on this page lays out build years for each; matching hull material and build era to what a given listing's history can actually document matters more here than it would with a single-yard brand.