1997 Lagoon Lagoon 410 — Shelter Bay Marina, PA

A 1997 Lagoon 410 asking $175,000 through yachtsite.com, lying at Shelter Bay Marina — our location field is garbled and its country code is not one we trust, so confirm where she sits before booking a flight. The 410 is the boat that made Lagoon: VPLP-drawn, the yard's first genuinely series-built catamaran under Bénéteau, some 280-odd hulls between 1997 and 2006, 40.6 ft on 23.3 ft of beam. The signature is volume, not speed — saloon level with the cockpit, full keels, buoyancy pushed into the ends of the hulls to hold the pitching down. It made its name in charter, then as a cheap first ocean cat; the standing criticism of the type is bulkhead attachment, and that is where a surveyor should start.

Two honesty notes. This hull is from the first model year, before the S2 revisions. And we hold no condition or equipment detail at all — the source page's specification block came through as bare section labels — so treat inventory, engines and hours as unknown until the broker answers.

The price reads high for a first-series boat of this age. It sits at the top of the catamarans under $200k, and among charter-size catamarans the same money reaches newer hulls. A 2004 Lagoon 410 S2 at Kemah asks $189,999 — seven years newer, revised galley, larger hull windows — for $14,999 more.

Near enough the same money buys nine years off the clock if you can live in three fewer feet: the 2006 Lagoon 380 S2 at Tarragona asks $178,200.

Where the opposite instinct leads — away from charter volume — the 1995 Prout 45 at Stuart is four more feet of narrow-hulled English cruising cat at $179,000.

If it is the 410 itself you want, this is the one to survey first: