Vineyard Vixen sailboats for sale

Buying a used Vineyard Vixen: scarcity from a yard that chose to stop building

Every Vineyard Vixen on the market is a used boat from a closed production run: a small New England yard built 53 of them and then, deliberately, stopped. That makes condition on the individual hull, not model-year comparison shopping, the real driver of the decision — there is no ongoing production to set a baseline against, and no dealer network standing behind the name. What a buyer is really weighing is a Rozinante-influenced double-ender, hand-built on Martha's Vineyard in modest numbers, against the usual tradeoffs of owning any older small-yard boat: harder-to-source parts and a design pedigree that has to be judged on its own history rather than a current catalog.

Which era to target

The line ran for the same window on both hulls: 30 examples of the 29-footer and 23 of the 34-footer, built on similar lines, between 1973 and 1986. Within that run, deck construction is a useful marker: the yard cored the first roughly fifteen hulls' decks in plywood before switching later boats to foam core, so a hull's position in the production sequence is worth establishing before judging deck condition, since the two core materials age and delaminate differently.

What to inspect across the range

Practical Sailor's review flagged the chainplates as the item most worth a close look — they need periodic rebedding to keep water from working into the bulkhead or the hanging knees that support them, though the magazine noted that the yard's solid, uncored fiberglass hull and deck laminate held up without consequential damage even where such leaks occurred. The same review flagged the original wood hatches at the companionway, forward, and lazarette: several owners have since swapped them for standard hardware, a fix that requires rebuilding the boss the hatch seals against. It also noted that the boats' single-line lifelines fall short of current safety recommendations, worth budgeting for on any hull still carrying the original rigging.

Navigating the lineup

The choice mostly comes down to size and rarity: the 29-footer is the more plentiful of the two, while the canoe-sterned 34 was built in smaller numbers on similar lines. That makes this less a question of which is the "better" boat and more a question of which length suits the buyer — one the full model directory on this page breaks out by year and size.