New England Boatworks Yachts for Sale

Three men who had worked together for other builders and marina operators started New England Boatworks at Portsmouth, Rhode Island in 1988. They got their break in 1991 renting space at the East Passage Yachting Center and bought the property outright in 1995 and 1996. The yard began in aluminum, fiberglass and wood and moved to light composites, and it is now known mainly for prepreg carbon racing and performance cruising yachts from roughly 20 to 150 feet, though it still takes aluminum work and has done structural composite jobs ashore, including the Postcards memorial on Staten Island. Safe Harbor Marinas bought the Portsmouth property in May 2019 for 27 million dollars and it trades today as Safe Harbor New England Boatworks, still listing custom yachts and high performance sailing yachts alongside the marina and service business, and still working to ISO 9001:2015.

Nothing here is a model. Every New England Boatworks boat is a one off and the hull is built in house at Portsmouth to somebody else's drawings, so the first question on any of them is whose design it is and what the build actually was. A 90 foot raised pilothouse motor yacht drawn by C. Raymond Hunt and a 68 foot carbon racer are the same builder and nothing else in common. Buy the build book with the boat: the laminate schedule, the structural drawings, the engineering, the cure records and the refit history. On a carbon boat the survey is about load paths rather than blisters, so chainplates, the keel structure and its floors, ring frames, rudder bearings, and any evidence of impact or repair. Expect a thin resale market, because a unique boat has a small pool of buyers and no book value to argue from. The compensation is unusually good ongoing support: the yard is still open under the Safe Harbor name and the people who laid up your hull can still be asked about it, which is not true of most custom builders this far along.