Winner sailboats for sale

Buying a used Winner: a small yard's design pedigree, interrupted and carried forward

A used Winner comes from a yard that never built at mainstream-production scale — a Dutch manufactory whose boats have carried Van de Stadt naval architecture since it began building performance cruisers in 1986. That smaller footprint cuts two ways for a buyer: fewer comparable examples to check condition and spec against, but a lineage with real design consistency, from the trailerable 8 up to the 12.20 flagship. It is also a brand whose story includes a hard stop — a 2016 bankruptcy — followed by continued production under new, cross-border ownership, so a used Winner's era says as much about who actually built it as its hull number does.

Which era to target

Boats built before the 2016 bankruptcy came from the original Dutch yard, first in Enkhuizen and then, from 2015, a smaller site in Medemblik — everything from the 1987 9.50 through the 2014 trailerable 8. Boats from the current ownership era, including the Winner 9 Speedlight introduced in October 2021, are built differently below the waterline: vinylester-laminated hulls and stainless cradles in place of the earlier steel-framed construction, assembly now centered in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, and an electric pod drive with under-sail energy recuperation on offer. A buyer choosing between the two eras is choosing between the original Dutch-built range and the yard's German-led second chapter.

What to inspect across the range

YACHT's used-boat tests flag the same structural detail on two different models built years apart: both the 9.50 and the 10.10 carry a galvanized steel frame laminated into the hull, and both reviews warn it needs close inspection for rust — on the 9.50, any rust means checking the keel seam from the outside; on the 10.10, the advice is blunter still, that a rusting frame gets expensive fast. The forward end of the boat is worth particular attention too: early 9.50s had a right-angled opening to the foredeck where cracks sometimes formed under rig loads before the yard rounded the passage on later boats, and YACHT's 10.10 guide separately flags the projections in the bilge for hairline cracks and the small bulkhead under the foredeck for anchor-locker leaks.

Navigating the lineup

Size does most of the sorting: the trailerable 8 sits well below the 9.50/9-family boats built for shorthanded and singlehanded sailing, which in turn sit below the family-cruising 10.10/10.20 and the larger 11.20, with the 12.20 flagship at the top of the original range. The full model directory on this page breaks the lineup out by hull number for a closer look.