As Yachtsnet specialises in sailing yachts, we will not discuss powerboats. For a sailing yacht, you have a number of choices:

Keep the boat at home: There are small sailing yachts designed to be towed on a trailer, and launched when required. Although at first glance this might seem to be a good choice for smaller boats - up to a maximum of perhaps 25-26 ft. there are few people that actually do this, for good reason. In comparison with launching a small powerboat from a trailer, launching and rigging a sailing yacht is very time-consuming, as you have to put up the mast and rig sails. Many people with “trailable” boats in fact only launch them in spring and retrieve them in autumn, leaving them on a mooring or marina berth through the summer. The trailer is a way to keep them at home in the winter, at no cost, and to be convenient for working on maintenance.

Most trailer-sailers either have relatively little ballast, or use water ballast tanks to aid stability, the water ballast being drained when the boat is brought ashore to tow, to reduce towing weight. This generally reduces their performance compared to most other sailing boats.

There are a few trailable sailing boats that are designed to be dual-purpose “power-sailers”, with a sailing rig plus a powerful engine to give planing powerboat performance. These, on the whole, are neither very good sailing boats or very good powerboats, yet for some people are a useful compromise, particularly for lake or very sheltered water use.

Moorings: When we talk of moorings we mean boats tied to buoys in a harbour. You will need a means of getting to the boat, usually via a dinghy kept ashore, or in some places there are “water taxi” services that will take you to your moored boat. Some yacht clubs offer a similar “club launch” service for club members, but all these services have one snag - if you get back to your mooring late in the evening, the club or water taxi service may have stopped running.

Moorings themselves come in several flavours - the three main types being deepwater moorings, drying moorings, and trot moorings.

Deepwater moorings are not necessarily in especially deep water - the phrase simple means that the mooring position will always have enough tidal height to keep the boat floating. In popular locations deepwater moorings are highly sought after, and in many harbours there is a substantial waiting list to get one - sometimes ten years or more. So do not think you can just buy a 35 foot yacht and turn up in Dartmouth or Salcombe, and ask the harbourmaster for a yearly mooring.

Drying moorings will let the boat settle down onto the bottom at low water, and can thus only be used by sailing yachts that can “take the ground” - usually those with bilge keels or drop keels. Drying moorings are almost always cheaper than deepwater moorings, and are usually easier to obtain, although in popular areas there can still be a waiting list.

Drying moorings are found in the upper end of most estuaries: they restrict the times you can use the boat

Most harbours used by yachts have a harbour authority, which allocates and maintains their own moorings, and collects daily harbour dues from visiting yachts. In many places, there are also privately owned moorings, which can sometimes be sublet.

All the above moorings allow each boat to swing around to face the wind, and as a result the moorings have to be spaced reasonably far apart. Trot moorings are an alternative way of mooring, which allows more yachts to fit in a given area of seabed. Boats are moored bow and stern to a series of buoys (or sometimes steel or wooden posts) so they cannot swing in a circle.

Pontoon or marina berths: when a yacht’s “berth” is referred to it usually means a marina berth, where the boat is moored alongside a pontoon walkway, that leads you to the shore, and usually a bar/restaurant, showers, car parking etc. For most people these are by far the most convenient places to keep a sailing yacht, but inevitably they are always more expensive than moorings, even although the fact that boats do not move once berthed means that a lot of boats can be fitted into a small space. Many marinas are near full, and some have waiting lists for berths, though currently if you are prepared to pay their rates, most will find you a space fairly quickly.

The final option for keeping a sailing yacht is to “dry sail” her. This means that the boat stays ashore in a boatyard, until you phone them and tell them you want her in the water on a given day. You arrive on the day, and your boat is afloat on a convenient pontoon mooring, ready for you to step aboard. The cost is often similar to a pontoon berth - the snag is that you may be out of luck getting launched if you wait to phone the yard till the morning of the first day of a bank holiday weekend.

Types of yacht

Trailer-sailers are more popular in the USA than in the UK, perhaps because American cars are usually bigger and more powerful than British ones. Probably the most popular trailer-sailers in the UK are Cornish Shrimpers and Crabbers, small gaff-rigged yachts with a lifting centreboard, and the French Beneteau 210/211/217 21 ft mini-yachts. About the biggest practical trailer-sailers are the US-built MacGregors and Hunter Legends, and a number of Polish built lift-keel yachts such as the Sportina range. The attraction of trailer-sailers is obvious - keep it in the drive at home, take it to different places each holiday, no permanent mooring fees, just launch site charges and a few days visitors mooring costs. If you are considering buying a trailer-sailer, however, do not underestimate the work and time involved in rigging and derigging it each time you launch.

Centreboard yachts are relatively rare, except in the smaller sizes. The centreboard is a hinged lifting keel, which can either be heavy, and part of the yacht’s ballast, or simply a relatively lightweight keel to reduce leeway. In order that the centreboard takes up minimal cabin space, the centreboard (sometimes called a centreplate) is often mainly external. Most centreboard yachts can use drying moorings, though those with external keel stubs may lean over substantially when aground. Jeanneau and Beneteau build various models of small centreboard yachts, all with external keels. Kirie in France used to build ‘Feeling’ centreboard yachts up to about 44 ft. Currently the main UK builder of centreboard yachts is Cornish Crabbers - a 22 ft Crabber is shown in the photo above, and a Beneteau 211 with external drop keel in the photo below.

Amongst the larger centreboard yachts are the Southerlys, built from the 1980s to early 2013, when the company went into administration - early Southerlys were as small as 28 ft, whilst the range in later years extended to 54 ft. Below - a 1990s Southerly 115

Lift keel yachts. The phrase “lift keel” is sometimes used to refer to yachts with hinged centreboards, but also more precisely to yachts whose entire keel slides up vertically, similarly to a daggerboard in a sailing dinghy.

Twin bilge keel yachts (often just called bilge keel yachts, or bilge-keelers) are primarily a British phenomenon, in response to the large number of harbours with drying moorings. The French have nearly as many drying harbours, but historically they seemed to prefer lift-keel or centreboard yachts. Some bilge-keel yachts have shallow keels and hence very poor windward performance, though others can perform almost as well as fin-keel yachts. The photo below shows two different bilge-keel yachts, a very traditional Macwester with shallow keels, and a more modern British Hunter with deep efficient twin keels.

Bilge keel yachts can sit upright on their twin keels at low tide, and also happily sit ashore in the winter on their keels, without the need for any further support. In sizes up to about 30 feet, bilge keel yachts are common in the secondhand market, but above this size they become rarer. Very few bilge keel yachts are now built - the market preference having changed to larger fin-keeled yachts.

Fin keel yachts have a single fin keel of iron or lead, with a separate rudder blade. Currently most production sailing yachts are of this type. A reasonably deep single keel gives good windward performance, at the price of needing a deep water mooring or berth. Ashore, fin keel yachts need to be supported in cradles, or with props.

A typical modern fin-keeled yacht - a 41 ft Beneteau - such yachts are usually built with a choice of deep or shallower draught fin keels. The charter yacht market has helped create the trend towards such yachts, big charter companies such as Sunsail and The Moorings ordering large batches of yachts each year. Volume production thus drives prices down.

Most keels are made of cast iron: though lead is in almost all respects a better material it is much more expensive. Keels can either be external and bolted on to the hull (the most common type nowadays), or encapsulated, where the hull moulding includes a hollow glassfibre keel moulding that is filled with iron or lead ballast.

Long keel yachts are now rarely built, though a few niche market builders do still produce yachts with long keels. Technically a long keel is one that runs underwater almost the whole length of the hull, but the term is nowadays often used to refer to what is really a cutaway long keel, with the forward keel edge set back from the bow.

Catamarans and trimarans are multi-hulled yachts, and unlike monohulls, are not normally ballasted. There is a wide range of types, from ultra-high performance boats, to relatively sedate cruising boats. Many people like multihulls for their lack of heel - unlike monohull yachts which heel significantly as the wind increases. Critics point out that a catamaran or trimaran CAN be capsized, and once capsized will remain afloat but inverted. In practice capsizing a cruising multihull is an exceptionally rare occurrence. Multihull enthusiasts retort that monohulls can sink - but that too is incredibly rare in practice.

One real snag with multihulls is that many marinas charge them extra for berthing, as their wide beam takes up more space than a monohull of equivalent length. A number of trimarans, including the Danish-built Dragonflys, get round this by having outer floats which fold in to the sides of the main hull, reducing the beam to much the same as that of many monohulls. Trimarans tend nowdays to be built more for performance than for interior space.

Construction materials

GRP - glass reinforced plastic, sometimes called FRP or fibreglass is by far the most common material used now for yachts, for good reason. It is easy to form into any shape required, reasonably cheap, reasonably strong, and fairly long-lasting with minimal maintenance required. It is fairly easily repaired, and although the material does have disadvantages, its virtues generally outweigh them. GRP hulls are made of structural layers of woven and matted glass fibres set in polyester resins, with an outer cosmetic layer of a special resin called gelcoat, giving the surface smoothness and shine.

When GRP yachts were first built in the 1950s and 1960s, the material was promoted as being maintenance-free, which turned out not to be quite the case, though it is still probably the one of the lowest maintenance materials of any used for yacht hulls. The one major snag of GRP hulls is that they can suffer from what is called "osmosis" - a tendency to absorb water and suffer blisters on the surface. This is usually primarily a cosmetic defect, but in bad cases it can have an affect on structural strength. Our web page on osmosis explains this in more detail.

Paint has been the finish of quality yachts for many, many years, and even now almost every billionaire's superyacht is painted from new....

Wood is the oldest material used for yachts, and few new yachts are now built in timber, though many are still sailing. As a traditional wooden boat is infinitely repairable, it has a potentially endless life, though probably the oldest small wooden boat still actively sailing is the oyster smack "Boadicea", built in 1808. There are quite a few 100 year old or more yachts still in regular use, and many thousands of 50-75 year old yachts. The quality of the timber is key to longevity, and quality wood is expensive. Whilst wooden boats inevitably need more maintenance than many other materials, a quality wooden yacht in good condition does not need that much more work to keep it up in good order. The real work comes once a wooden boat is allowed to deteriorate.

The two main traditional wooden build techniques are carvel and clinker construction - carvel having planks laid edge to edge, and sealed with caulking, and clinker planks laid with overlapping edges.

Steel yachts are popular with long-distance voyagers - the primary reason being that a steel hull will survive (perhaps badly dented but still floating) damage that would destroy a GRP or wooden hull. Also, steel can be repaired anywhere there is a local welder. The problem with steel is that owning a steel yacht required constant vigilance to combat rust - treating any rust patches immediately they appear. It is rare to find steel yacht below 32 ft in length, though a few are around.

Aluminium is one of the finest materials for yacht consruction: it is strong, stiff, and light - but it is an expensive material to build a yacht hull from, so apart from quite a number of "superyachts", aluminium boats are rare. Aluminium yachts do have some specialised maintenance requirements to avoid corrosion, but overall it is a superb material.

Ferrocement yachts - in the 1960s and 1970s there was surge in the construction of ferrocement boats - because the raw materials were cheap. Many were amateur built, and many amateur built ferro boats were very badly built. A good one, whether amateur or yard-built, is however very strong, no heavier than a similar sized steel or GRP boat, and has minimal maintenance.

Ferrocement yachts are always cheaper than equivalent boats in most other materials, due to the poor reputation of the material - which for a good example is totally unfounded. Beware the bad ones though!

Build quality

Just as a Ferrari or Rolls Royce will be built differently to a Ford or Renault, there is a huge difference in build quality between mass production yachts and custom and semi-custom built yachts. You can buy two or three new GRP production yachts, from builders such as Bavaria, Jeanneau, Beneteau and several others, for the price of one new Swedish Hallberg-Rassy or Nordship, or an American Island Packet, of the same length.

The mass-market boat will have an interior built of computer-cut veneered ply or even in places MDF, with a small amount of solid hardwood trim. There will be visible screws holding panels together, and much of the wiring and plumbing, plus items such as pumps, engines and tanks will have been fitted to the hull before the rest of the interior was assembled on top, making later modification and repair more difficult - though rarely impossible. If a mass-production yacht has teak decks, it will be a thin cosmetic layer glued on, with a finite life before it needs repair or replacement. Unlike a cheap car, however, the boat itself will have a relatively long life - in fact we do not really know how long - as most built-down-to-a-price yachts from the 1970s and 1980s are still sailing around. Although current mass-production GRP yachts are built with thinner glassfibre shells than 1970s/80s boats, the designers now mostly use higher specification materials and more sophisticated build techniques.

The expensive “quality” yacht will probably have a more strongly built hull, but almost all of the higher price will be due to less automation in the factory, and much more hand workmanship, with more solid hardwoods and beautifully detailed joinery. Often systems will be installed after the majority of the build is finished, forcing thought as to ease of access for maintenance. The boat will almost certainly have teak decks, made of thicker planks than the cosmetic skin on cheaper boats. Because less of the build is automated, the potential for teething trouble with a new yacht may actually be greater than with a mass-production boat - but the commissioning seller should take a lot of trouble though sea-trials and “snagging” to fix these before handover. Most builders of “quality” yachts will allow buyers to specify a degree of customisation to the interior.

For the buyer of a secondhand yacht, the price differential remains - the “quality” yacht will always command a higher price than the “production” boat of a similar size. As boats age, you often find that the interior joinery of a quality built yacht survives years of wear and tear much better than the cheaper equivalent.

On deck, however, there is one big difference - the cost of replacing teak decking. With a “cheap” boat - if there is ever such a thing - with luck there will be very little external woodwork to maintain, and if there are glued-on panels of thin decorative teak they can be replaced either with new thin teak, or with one of the synthetic substitutes at not too horrendous a cost. Often, however, a “quality” yacht will have a “proper” teak deck - individual shaped thicker teak planks screwed down with hundreds of small screws, the screwhead holes plugged with teak plugs, and the planking seams caulked. Once this sort of traditional teak decking reaches the end of it’s life (often because of over-aggressive cleaning) a like-for-like replacement can be eyewateringly expensive.

This page is written by John Wilson of Yachtsnet Ltd., and is copyright

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