Southerly Yachts for Sale

Southerly is the British swing keel brand. The boats were developed and built at the Northshore shipyard at Itchenor on Chichester Harbour in West Sussex from 1975, the lifting keel arrived in 1978, and by the time Northshore stopped building in 2014 the range ran from about 32 to 57 feet. Discovery Yachts bought the rights and tooling in 2017 and restarted production from Southampton, then hit financial trouble and closed at the end of 2021. Concept Yachts, a Southampton marine contractor, then bought the brand and the molds and is building again, which is where the recent 420s come from. More than 900 variable draft Southerlys are sailing.

Everything about buying one comes back to the keel. A cast iron blade swings up into a heavy keel box on a hydraulic ram, so the boat sails to windward like a deep draft yacht and then anchors in three and a half feet, and if it hits something it swings clear rather than tearing out. With the keel up the boat sits on a ballasted grounding plate and a centerline skeg that shields the propeller and the twin rudders, so it will dry out upright on a sandbank. For anyone cruising the Bahamas, the Keys or the Chesapeake that is close to the ideal underbody. It is also the survey. Get the keel lifted and lowered repeatedly, check the ram, the hoses, the pump, the pivot pin and the seals, look hard inside the keel box for corrosion and for stress in the surrounding laminate, and treat a boat whose keel has not been cycled in a year with suspicion, because this is the expensive part and nobody in the United States fixes them casually. The rest is ordinary British production yacht: good, heavy, well finished, with a deck saloon on the larger models that gives you a seated view out. Almost all of them were built in England, so check whether the boat came over on European specification with 230 volt 50 hertz systems, what was done about shore power, whether the electronics and appliances are the US versions, and that the duty was paid on import. Parts for the boat itself come from the United Kingdom, and with three different companies having owned the brand since 2014 it is worth establishing who, if anyone, stands behind the hull you are looking at.