Contest Yachts for Sale

Contest is the yacht brand of Conyplex, founded at Medemblik in the Netherlands in 1959 by Ed Conijn, who had gone to the United States to learn about fiberglass and came home to build in it. The yard passed from Ed to his son Fritz and then to Arjen Conijn, who runs it now with Marcel Borgmann. The first boats were small, an open two man dinghy and then the Contest 25, which sold more than three hundred, and the range moved steadily up into the serious cruising sizes it occupies today, currently about 42 to 72 feet in sail plus a 52 foot powerboat, built by around eighty boatbuilders turning out a dozen or so boats a year. Construction now is vacuum infusion with balsa core in hull, deck and bulkheads. The older boats, the Contest 30, 31, 33, 35, 38, 40 and 48 from the 1960s to the 1980s, were heavily laid up and are the ones most Americans meet secondhand, often as ketches rigged and fitted out for ocean passages.

These were built for the North Sea and sold mainly in Europe, which is what to check first. An older Contest that came over from Holland will very likely be 220 volt 50 hertz with European shore power fittings, metric plumbing and European instruments, and converting all that properly is a real number, not a weekend. Confirm too that US duty has been paid and the documentation is clean, because boats sailed over privately sometimes arrive with that unfinished. There is no American dealer or parts network for the old models, although Conyplex is still in business and still answers questions about boats it built, which is more than most yards of that vintage can offer. What you get in return is a genuinely strong hull, a deep dry cockpit, tankage and stowage sized for passages, and joinery that has generally lasted. Survey the chainplates and their bedding, the rudder bearings, the keel bolts, deck core around fittings and the original tanks, and treat a boat already converted to American electrics by a competent yard as worth a real premium over one that has not.