Irwin Yachts for Sale

Ted Irwin founded Irwin Yacht and Marine at St. Petersburg, Florida in 1966 and for a while ran one of the largest sailboat operations in the country. He was a racing sailor who wanted boats that could hold their own on a course and still be comfortable to live on, and what came out of that was a long line of center cockpit cruisers with very large aft cabins: the 37 Mark IV, the 42, the 52, the 54, the 65 and the 68, plus the more performance minded Citation boats. A lot of the bigger ones went into Caribbean charter fleets. The company went through a run of bankruptcies and name changes and finally closed in 1992. Ted Irwin died in 2015.

Second hand, an Irwin is the most interior volume per dollar on the brokerage market, and that is both the attraction and the warning. They were built to a price in a period when quality control moved around, so buy the boat and not the model. Known trouble spots are the hull to deck joint and the teak toe rail above it, leaks at portlights and hatches, the rudder and skeg on the larger boats, and tired seacocks and wiring. Charter history is common on the 52 and up and is worth tracing. There has been no factory since 1992 and no one honours a warranty, so anything model specific, hatches, ports, hardware, comes off another boat or gets fabricated.