1998 Prout 38 — Diego Martin, TT

A 1998 Prout 38 at Diego Martin, Trinidad, asking $126,873 through yachtsite.com. Prout had built catamarans at Canvey Island in Essex since the 1950s, and the 38 is late work — launched in 1998, three years before the yard's first receivership, and good enough that the moulds outlived the company as the Broadblue 38. The signature is the rig: the mast steps well aft, on the aft cabin bulkhead, leaving a small blade mainsail and a large furling foretriangle — less to reef, more to roll away, a boat two people can work from the cockpit. Heavy, fixed-keeled, 17.4 ft of beam on 38 ft: narrow by current fashion, and a liveaboard proposition rather than a quick one.

Two honesty notes. We hold no second Prout 38, so there is no sister to price this hull against, and no condition or days-on-market record for it. The virtues come as a trade: seakindly and easily short-handed, but you step down into the saloon from the cockpit, and no one buys one for windward work.

On price it sits mid-band. The mid-1990s 36–39 ft cats we hold ask nearer $95,000; a decade-newer 38-footer, or the bigger Prout, asks $167,000 and up. At $126,873 it asks a clear premium over its contemporaries, with no sister to justify it — read it against catamarans under $200k.

The straight alternative is the 1995 Fountaine Pajot Athena 38 at Saint Augustine: same length, French school, $31,873 less.

Where the opposite instinct leads is the 1998 Shuttleworth Ocean Cheetah 37 at Deltaville, the same year at the same $95,000.

The yard's own step up is the 1995 Prout 45 at Stuart, Florida: seven more feet of the same thinking, $52,127 more.

But if it is the mast-aft Prout you want, this is the one to survey first: