2022 cape 31 narwhal — La Spezia, La Spezia

A 2022 Cape 31, asking $177,800 through 31 North Group / RacingYachts.com. Mark Mills drew the type in 2017 on a commission from Lord Irvine Laidlaw: a one-design that could also win under IRC, without the cost of full-carbon construction. The signature is all hull — low freeboard, hard chines for form stability once it blows, little wetted surface when it does not — and the class it seeded, series-built in Cape Town, ran to roughly eighty boats by early 2025, the strongest 30-foot one-design story of the decade.

Be clear what is for sale: an inshore race tool, sailed windward-leeward with a full crew, with no accommodation to trade against. One-design rules keep the hulls close, so between two examples you are paying for the year and the kit — and our data shows neither kit nor location, condition, or time on market for this boat. Those questions go to the broker.

On price the shelf is blunt. The 1999–2003 production cruisers of 31–36 feet we hold ask $34,900–$76,000; this boat asks $177,800 — a race budget, and it files with the racing monohulls. Both Cape 31s on our shelf sit on the same model page and with the same broker, and the nearest door is the sister ship: a 2021 example at $165,100, one season older and $12,700 less:

If the sporting instinct must also cross water and sleep its crew, the 2002 Pogo 8.50 in south Brittany is the shorthanded translation of it at $69,660 — $108,140 under this boat:

And where the opposite instinct leads, near-identical money — $178,200, just $400 more — buys a 2006 Lagoon 380 S2 in Tarragona, a cruising catamaran that is everything this boat refuses to be:

But if one-design racing is the purchase, this is the newer of our pair — the one to survey first: