Duffy Yachts for Sale

Richard Duffy and his father Ralph, known as Riley, started building fiberglass lobster boats at Brooklin, Maine in 1975, in a shop thirty feet by fifty, and sold their first complete boat that spring to a Stonington lobsterman for 17,500 dollars. Orders for eight or ten more came within months. Richard drew the first hull, a 34, on his kitchen table, and Spencer Lincoln drew everything after it: the 26, 30, 31, 35, 41, 42, 48 and 50. The 35 is the one that made the name, a fine entry with flattened after sections and a shaft angled closer to horizontal, and it has been in build since 1982. Duffy and Duffy merged with Flye Point Marine in 1995 to form Atlantic Boat Company, Tern Inc. bought that in 2009, and the boats are still built on the same 40 acres at Brooklin. The 35 hull was updated with a new mold in 2002 and separate cruising and fishing deck versions followed in 2003.

This is a working boat hull sold as a yacht and it should be bought as one. Semi displacement, full keel, protected wheel: it is easy on fuel in the low to middle teens, it tracks, it goes into weather well, and it will roll at anchor and it will never be fast. What is a Duffy is a harder question than it looks, because the yard sells bare hulls and kits as well as finished boats, so one 35 may be a factory yacht, the next a yard completion and the next an owner's winter project, and they are not the same boat at any price. Establish which you are looking at before anything else, then survey the finish rather than the hull: bulkhead tabbing, stringers, engine beds, fuel tanks, the wiring and the steering, because that is where a home completion shows. Note whether the hull predates the 2002 mold. Support is unusually good for a boat of this age and it is the strongest argument for the brand: Atlantic Boat Company is still at Brooklin, still building the same boats off the same molds and still selling kits and parts, so a thirty year old Duffy can be repaired with factory pieces by the people who make them.