Concordia Yachts for Sale

Llewellyn Howland founded Concordia at South Dartmouth in 1926 and named it for a Howland whaling ship. In 1932 he handed it to his son Waldo and to the designer C. Raymond Hunt, who ran it as a brokerage and design office through the 1930s. When the 1938 hurricane destroyed the family's Norwegian pilot boat, Hunt drew a replacement, design number fourteen, and that became the Concordia yawl: 39 feet 10 inches, African mahogany on oak, 18,000 pounds, 690 square feet of sail, the star and moon cove stripe. 103 were commissioned to 1966, including 26 of the larger 41 foot version, and they are the largest class of big one design wooden sailboats ever built. Waldo Howland sold to Bill Pinney in 1969, Brodie MacGregor bought the company in 1981, Stuart MacGregor owns it now, and since 2007 the whole operation has worked from 14 acres at 300 Gulf Road, a mile west of Padanaram Harbor, as a service and restoration yard.

Read that history carefully, because Concordia commissioned these boats, it did not build them. The hulls are German, from Abeking & Rasmussen, which took the work on because it could build them affordably and leave Concordia to finish the details, and that is a large part of why so many are still sailing. What you are buying is a wooden yacht sixty to eighty five years old, so the restoration history matters far more than the year on the paperwork: most have been rebuilt at least once, and a well documented rebuild is a better buy than a boat that is original and tired. Survey with a wooden boat specialist and ask for fastenings, frames and floors, keelbolts, the deck and its covering, and the invoices from the last major refit. Then budget properly: this is a boat that needs yard time every single year, forever, and an owner who does not want that will be unhappy in a season. Against that, support is as good as it gets for a classic. Concordia Company is still at Padanaram, still restores these boats and still holds records for them, the class keeps track of every hull, and values for sound boats are well understood rather than speculative. One caution on the badge: a few later and quite unrelated boats carry the Concordia name, including a Tripp 47 built by Concordia in 1995, which is a modern composite racer cruiser and shares nothing with a yawl but the label.