Columbia 28 Sailboat Review, Specs, and Listings

Design and Construction

Crealock gave the Columbia 28 a skeg-on-skeg arrangement and counted it among the first fin-keel Columbias, pairing that underwater profile with a spade rudder and a solid fiberglass laminate hull skeg-on-skeg fin-keel layout. The topside treatment traded the older boxy cabin and ports for bullet-shaped main windows and a raised bump in the main cabin roof, a visual shift that also bought a little more standing room below. The lead ballast of 3,000 pounds sits in a bolt-on fin, and the boat carries 6,500 pounds of displacement on an 8-foot 6-inch beam with a 4-foot 7-inch draft. Early hulls such as number 8 are reported to have carried an all-wood interior with no fiberglass except the hull, exterior decks, soles, and cockpit, while later boats moved to fiberglass interiors — a manufacturing change that tracks the broader Columbia shift toward molded liners during the period.

Rig and Handling

As a masthead sloop the Columbia 28 carries 343 square feet of sail area, and its sail-area-to-displacement ratio of about 15.8 places it in the moderate-power band rather than the lively-light or heavy-displacement extremes. The rig dimensions run an I of 31.5 feet and J of 12 feet, with a 26.75-foot mainsail luff and a 102-percent jib as the working geometry; a 150-percent genoa and asymmetrical spinnaker were part of the sail plan. The combination of fin keel, spade rudder, and modest beam gives a boat conceived for club racing and weekend cruising, and the 21-foot 10-inch waterline keeps her in a sensible coastal-cruiser stride.

Accommodations

Below, the Columbia 28 offers 5 feet 10 inches of headroom, a figure that the cabin-roof bump was clearly meant to support. Tankage is modest even by period standards: 18 gallons of water and 12 gallons of fuel. The CCA rating of 24.4 reflects a hull conceived for club racing and weekend cruising rather than long offshore passage work, and the compact interior volume is best read as a couple's or small-family coastal boat.

Known Issues

The structural weak points on these boats are well mapped. Chainplate leaks have rotted bulkheads on many examples and must be regarded as a routine inspection item rotted bulkheads from chainplate leaks. Deck soft spots develop where bolts or other hardware pass through the fiberglass into the wood core, a direct consequence of the cored deck construction. On the Mk II, the mast compression post sits down in the bilge and may stay wet most of the time; one owner and his surveyor found substantial wet rot in that post between the keelson and the interior floorboards, so the member should be considered perpetually at risk. Keel attachment is another watch item: the boat uses seven 3/4-inch-diameter by 9-inch lag studs driven from the top, and some owners have had to replace corroded keel bolts, a fate common to older fin-keel designs.

Refits and Ownership

The Columbia 28 never received an official Mk II designation from the sales department, though Dick Valdes notes the builder experimented with bolt-on keel shapes, reshaping the fin from an upside-down T to a V. True Mk II hulls also carried a taller mast, but some Mk II hulls left the factory or were later rigged with the shorter mast, so rig height alone does not confirm a generation. With 553 built and a simple solid-glass hull, the boat remains a practical candidate for an owner undertaking renewal of worn systems.

The Verdict

The Columbia 28 is a Crealock-designed fin-keel sloop that modernized the Columbia small-boat line in 1967 and delivered a moderate-powered, responsive coastal cruiser in a compact package. Its weaknesses are the usual older-boat suspects concentrated in chainplate and deck-core moisture paths, plus a bilge-sitting compression post on later rigs, but the solid hull and straightforward keel attachment make it a sane owner-project.

Pros