Used Catamarans under $200k for sale

Two hundred thousand dollars is the line where the catamaran market changes character. Above it sit the boats the charter fleets bought new and the brochures photograph; below it sit older hulls, smaller hulls, and the models the big yards no longer build. Scout watches a few hundred of them. The shelf below is not all of them and is not meant to be — it is the ones whose files we have checked, and the rule for getting on it is plain: a catamaran, twenty-eight feet or more, asking between one hundred and two hundred thousand. Both lines are there on purpose. The length floor because a Hobie Wave is a catamaran and it is not what anyone means by this question; the price floor because a $30,000 Gemini is real and honest and answers a different question than this one — the cheapest catamarans are their own shelf, not the bottom of this page.

Four yards account for most of what exists at this money, and only one of them is a name you would recognise from a charter brochure. Lagoon is here because the 1990s and early 2000s boats — the 35, the 380, the 440 — have aged into the price band while the yard moved upmarket. Leopard sits alongside them for the same reason: the 38s and 40s from twenty years ago are the charter fleet's grandparents. Gemini is the odd one out and the interesting one, an American yard that built a narrow-beam 31 and 34-footer for people who wanted a catamaran and a normal marina berth, which is why so many survive. Island Spirit rounds it out with a handful of South African hulls that turn up cheap and honest.

What that mix tells you is worth more than any single listing. Under $200,000 you are almost always buying a boat from the last century or the first years of this one, and the money goes into age rather than size: the same budget buys a tired 45-footer or a well-kept 35, and the 35 is usually the better boat. The questions that decide it are the ones every survey asks of a cat this old — bulkhead-to-hull bonding, daggerboard or keel stub condition, the state of the bridgedeck where it has been slammed for thirty years, and whether the rig has ever been out. None of that is exotic. All of it is checkable before you spend the money.

If your budget stretches, the boats between two and three hundred thousand are a different fleet — mostly ex-charter forty-somethings, which is its own decision. If it does not, look at cruising sailboats under $50k, where the same money buys a monohull with twice the boat, or at the folding trimarans if what you actually wanted was two hulls' stability without two hulls' berth fees.