Alden Yachts for Sale

Alden is a design office before it is a boatbuilder, and that is the thing to hold onto when reading a listing. John G. Alden set up in Boston in 1909 and the name was made offshore, with the Malabar schooners taking the Bermuda Race three times between 1923 and 1932. Boats to Alden drawings were built by many different yards over a century, in wood and later in fiberglass, from 19 feet up to the 72 foot schooner When and If built for General Patton. The later fiberglass boats, the 44, 54 and 72, came through Alden Yachts at Portsmouth, Rhode Island; the Alden 44, drawn with Niels Helleberg, was built for them by Tillotson Pearson in Rhode Island from 1976 to 1991, 40 hulls in all. The firm closed in 2008.

So the first question on any Alden is not the year, it is who built her. A 1930s wooden Alden and a 1980s fiberglass Alden 44 share a drawing office and nothing else, and within the wooden boats the yard that did the work decides what you are buying. There is no factory, nobody honours a warranty and there are no spares, but Alden owners are better served than most: the complete drawing archive survives at the MIT Museum and copies are cheap, which for a restoration or a serious refit is worth more than a parts counter. Price a wooden boat on a shipwright's report, not a standard survey, and treat the fiberglass boats as good quality Rhode Island production work of their period.