Garcia Yachts for Sale

Garcia is a Normandy yard, founded in 1974 at Condé-sur-Noireau by Jean-Louis and Cyril Garcia to build aluminum sailboats, and it has essentially never built anything else. The Maracuja in the 1980s and then the Passoa established the house style: a heavily built, shoal draft, centerboard or lifting keel aluminum cruiser meant to be sailed a long way and dried out on a beach at the end of it. Grand Large Yachting bought the yard in 2010, and the partnership with the cruising writer Jimmy Cornell produced the Exploration 45 in 2014, which turned the brand into the default choice for sailors going to Greenland, Patagonia or the Northwest Passage. The range today is the Exploration 45, 52 and 60 and an aluminum catamaran, the Explocat 52.

Aluminum is the whole question on a used Garcia, and it cuts both ways. There is no osmosis, no core to go wet, and a hull that dents rather than holes when it meets ice or a reef, which is exactly why people buy them. Against that, aluminum needs a survey by somebody who genuinely understands it: bonding and grounding, stray current and galvanic corrosion around through hulls, the shaft and the anodes, pitting under insulation and under the paint, and the condition of any place where stainless or bronze touches the hull. Check the electrical system as carefully as the structure, because on an aluminum boat bad wiring is a structural problem. Look hard at the centerboard or lifting keel, its case, pennant and sheaves, since that is the other expensive item. These are French boats built for French and European owners, so expect 230 volt 50 hertz systems, European appliances and metric everything unless the boat was specified for the United States, and price the conversion or the transformer honestly. Grand Large Yachting has a North American presence but there is no dealer network here in the sense that a production builder has one, so parts and yard work come from France or from the small number of American yards that are comfortable with aluminum. Confirm US import duty was paid. The reward for all of that is a yacht that suits one specific owner very well: somebody leaving for high latitudes or remote coasts who wants a hull that will forgive a mistake.