Westsail sailboats for sale

Buying a used Westsail: a hull built to outlast the company that molded it

A used Westsail is a bet on a hull design more than on the business that built it -- the Costa Mesa outfit went from founding to bankruptcy to two further ownership changes inside a decade, while the boats themselves, hand-laid and full-keeled, descend from Colin Archer's North Sea rescue-boat lineage by way of William Atkin and Bill Crealock. The sharper risk for a buyer sits elsewhere: many hulls, especially among the 32s and to a lesser extent the larger 42, went out the door unfinished for owners to complete on their own time, so a given boat's interior, systems, and rigging can owe as much to whoever finished it in a driveway as to the yard that laid up the hull. This is a heavy, double-ended offshore passagemaker rather than a quick daysailer, and that category fit deserves more weight than which era or which owner's name is on a particular hull's paperwork.

Which era to target

The very first hulls, built on Larry Kendall's molds before Westsail Corporation even existed, carry a flush deck rather than the raised-bulwark hull-to-deck joint that became standard once two Westsail boatbuilders reworked the flange design in the early-to-mid 1970s -- a useful marker for dating the oldest boats in the range. Mainline production ran out of Costa Mesa, supplemented from the fall of 1973 (or 1974, by another account) by a second plant in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. After the parent company's 1977 bankruptcy and its run as Westsail International through 1979, the 42 and 43 tooling passed to the Santa Ana builder Jomarco and the 32 and 39 tooling to P&M Worldwide, so a small number of the very last hulls in each line were finished by a different company than the Westsail Corporation-built boats that came before them.

What to inspect across the range

Owner enthusiasts point to the laminate itself as a low-risk area on survey, not a high one -- the Westsail Owners Association's own retrospective on the brand credits it with sidestepping a problem common to polyester-resin peers of the same vintage, though that reputation is still worth confirming rather than assuming on any individual hull. The bigger variable is who finished the boat. Both the 32 and the 42 were offered complete from the factory or as a bare hull for the owner to fit out, and a larger share of 42s left the yard fully finished than 32s did -- so on any 32 in particular, a survey should scrutinize owner-executed interior, systems, and rigging work just as closely as the hull and deck moldings.

Navigating the lineup

The 32 is the volume boat and the model that carries the brand's identity -- a double-ended, full-keel cutter offered finished or as a kit throughout its run. The 42 and 43 share one larger Crealock hull split only by cockpit layout, center versus aft; the 28, a Herb David design, is the smaller entry point into the lineup; and the 39, a late Robert Perry design, is the rarest of the group, built only as the company neared its end. The full model directory on this page is the place to compare specific years and hull numbers once you've settled on which of those size-and-layout bands fits your plans.