Taylor sailboats for sale

Buying a used Taylor: two unrelated names to sort out first

Buying a used Taylor starts with confirming which Taylor is on the transom, because the name covers two completely unrelated builders. J.J. Taylor and Sons Ltd. was a Toronto boatyard that built the Taylor 26 under license from Jeremy Rogers' Contessa 26 design; Jim Taylor is an American yacht designer whose racing boats — including the 38, 40, and 40-2 in this lineup — were built by outside yards, not by any company called Taylor. Get the builder right before evaluating condition, because the two lines have nothing else in common.

Which era to target

For the Taylor 26, the dividing line is 1983. Hulls up through number 300 that year carried the original British-made hull and deck molds shipped over from Jeremy Rogers' UK yard; afterward, Gary Bannister, J.J. Taylor's principal partner, redesigned the deck mold and lowered the cabin floor by lengthening the aft hump for more headroom — a real difference in interior volume between the two periods. The boat carries two names for the same design: it sold as the Contessa 26 until 1984, when a rights dispute with a new UK owner of the Contessa name led J.J. Taylor to rename its Canadian-built boat the Taylor 26, with no change to the design itself. For the 38, 40, and 40-2, all three are early Jim Taylor racing designs — the 40 dates to 1988 and the 40-2 to 1989 — built before Taylor's design office moved, seven variations later, to a 1997-generation 40 engineered by Dirk Cramers and built by Boston Boatworks. That later generation is a different boat from a different builder; the earlier hulls here predate it.

Navigating the lineup

The Taylor 26 is the deepest and best-documented line, with roughly 400 Canadian-built hulls produced across its run — enough that hull number and build year, not just condition, are worth confirming against the 1983 mold change. The 38, 40, and 40-2 sit in a separate, smaller category of early Jim Taylor racing designs built by outside yards; treat them as a distinct search from the 26 rather than variations on the same boat. The full model directory on this page breaks the lineup down by year.