Valiant sailboats for sale

Buying a used Valiant: a hull-number decision as much as a model decision

A used Valiant is a bet on a specific production run more than on the model name alone. The Valiant 40 line passed through two distinct builders and a well-documented resin problem in between, so two boats sharing a model name and close model years can carry very different condition risk depending on exactly where their hull number falls. That makes hull-number research, not model year alone, the first task for anyone shopping this marque — especially on the pre-Texas boats.

Which era to target

Treat the hull number, not the model-year sticker, as the real filter on any Uniflite-built Valiant 40. Uniflite's Bellingham, Washington yard turned out 159 of them between 1975 and 1984, and the middle stretch of that run — hulls 120 through 249 — got a fire-retardant resin additive that Cruising World linked to most of the blistering later found on boats from that stretch. Hulls 250 through 266, built just ahead of the move to Texas, used a different, non-fire-retardant mix and are worth flagging as their own narrow band. Once Rich Worstell bought the molds in 1984 and shifted production to Texas the following year, hull 267 became the dividing line: nothing numbered past it carries the Uniflite-era resin risk. The Esprit 37 — sold in Valiant's own materials as the Valiant 37 — split along a similar builder line: hulls from Nordic Yachts, built 1977 to 1980, have held up largely free of blisters, while some of Uniflite's 1980-to-1982 hulls blistered both above and below the waterline before the model moved to an isophthalic resin that ended the problem. Everything Worstell's Texas yard built later — the 39, 42, 47, and 50 — sits on the far side of both timelines; the 42 in particular didn't arrive until Worstell updated the 40 for it in the early 1990s.

What to inspect across the range

On any Valiant 40 or Esprit 37/Valiant 37 candidate whose hull number lands inside the fire-retardant-resin window, a moisture-meter survey and a look for prior blister repair belong at the top of the checklist — most, though not all, boats built in that window developed blisters. Balsa coring also shows up in more than one Valiant deck: the Esprit 37, the Valiant 39, and the Valiant 32 all used it, and Cruising World's review of the Esprit 37 found decks that had gone soft where water reached the core around hardware and fastenings with age — a detail worth checking wherever a balsa-cored deck is present, not just on that one model.

Navigating the lineup

Size is the clearest way to sort what Valiant built: the 32 is the smallest and rarest of the line, with only about 67 built; the 40, 39, and 42 form the marque's mid-size backbone; and the 47 and 50 sit at the top as its largest offshore cruisers, each built mostly by hand and, in the 50's case, largely to order over roughly eight months per boat. From there, the full model directory on this page is the place to compare individual listings within whichever size and era fit.