Thompson sailboats for sale

Buying a used Thompson: identifying which of two unrelated designers you're buying

On almost any other make, the name on a listing tells you who built the boat. On a Thompson, it doesn't -- "Thompson" identifies a surname shared by two unconnected naval architects, an Englishman and a New Zealander, whose boats were designed decades and continents apart and built by yards that had nothing to do with each other. Buying a used Thompson well means doing the identification work the make name alone won't do: establishing which designer's boat it is, who actually built it, and which era it belongs to, before condition or price enters the conversation at all.

Which era to target

Model numbers do most of the identification work here. The imperial-numbered boats -- the T24, T27, and T31 -- are Guy Thompson's designs, commissioned in the 1960s and built in Chichester, England, first by DC Perfect and then, from 1969, by Hawkbridge. The metric-numbered boats -- the T750, T8, and T7, and by extension the further numeric model names in this catalog -- come from Steve Thompson's later New Zealand design practice, Tboats, and were built under contract in New Zealand and Australia. A model number is doing more work identifying a Thompson listing than it would on almost any other make, so confirm it before comparing anything else.

On the English side, know what you're looking at before viewing a T24: fiberglass carries the hull, but a timber deck sits above it, framed the conventional way rather than molded as one fiberglass piece. Only the cabin top was laid up as fiberglass throughout. That split construction isn't a defect by design, but on a boat now more than half a century old, the wood section is the one part of the deck that earns the same moisture-meter and soft-spot check a surveyor would give any timber deck, wherever the fiberglass-to-timber transition falls.

On the New Zealand and Australian side, there's no equivalent construction record to check a listing against, and the honest note for a buyer is that these boats were contract-built across several yards rather than turned out by one factory. Build quality and specification are worth assessing boat by boat rather than assumed from the model name or the era alone.

Navigating the lineup

Start by confirming which line a given listing actually belongs to: the T24 and T31 sit in the English line, while the T7 and the later metric-numbered boats sit in the New Zealand and Australian line, and the two share nothing beyond a surname. Treat that split as the first filter, ahead of size or layout, since a boat from one line tells you little about the other. The full model directory on this page lists the boats by name once that filter is applied.