Tanzer sailboats for sale

Buying a used Tanzer: one designer's engineering across most of the range

A used Tanzer is, more often than not, a boat Johann Tanzer himself drew. His own engineering habits - Practical Sailor found him prone to over-building, reusing the same keelbolt hardware and mast sections across models - run through most of the lineup, which gives the badge more consistency than brands assembled from unrelated design commissions. That consistency has a flip side: the company built for barely two decades, from its 1968 incorporation to a 1986 receivership, so nothing in the lineup is new production. Condition, not brand reputation, is what separates a good buy from a project.

Which era to target

The Tanzer 22, in production from 1970 to 1986, spans nearly the company's entire run, so its era markers are really the company's own: early hulls carry the resin-rich fiberglass and easily-crazed gelcoat Practical Sailor associated with that early construction period, while later hulls benefit from small running refinements without ever leaving the same basic design. Two models arrived in the company's final years and stand apart from the rest of the lineup: the Tanzer 27, sold from 1981 after Tanzer bought the tooling for an already-established design, and the Tanzer 31, a purpose-built cruiser-racer added to the line in 1984, of which only a small number were delivered before the company's 1986 collapse. A buyer chasing one of these late models is chasing a genuinely limited production run, not a long-run boat like the 22.

What to inspect across the range

Iron keels turn up more than once in the lineup - standard on the Tanzer 22 and standard again on the Tanzer 31, where a lead fin-keel option was offered instead. Owners have long treated this as one of the range's weak points: Practical Sailor's review calls it out by name, since iron keels run to rust in a way a lead casting doesn't. On hulls from the brand's first construction decade, the same review found the resin-heavy glass of that era prone to going soft and crumbly at screw penetrations, with the factory gelcoat quick to crack - a period issue rather than a flaw isolated to one model, worth checking regardless of which early Tanzer is under consideration.

Navigating the lineup

Tanzer's range breaks roughly into three groups: small one-design daysailers descended from Tanzer's very first design, the mid-size cruiser-racers built through most of the company's life and led by the 22, and the pair of larger boats - one bought in, one purpose-designed - that arrived only in the company's last few years. A buyer set on the boat with the deepest production run and the largest surviving owner network should look toward the mid-size end of that range; one after a rarer, later design should expect a shorter list of surviving hulls to choose from. The full model directory on this page breaks out every size and year.