I'm looking at the sailboat market at the moment in the 36'-40' range and there are a few sparkman & stephens 39s for sale that have caught my eye.

All of the ones I can see here in Australia seem to have been built by a "Prestige Yachts" or "Prestige-Bowman Yachts" in Western Australia, going from the 80s all the way through to the late 90s. I can't seem to find much information about the builder/build quality though. Does anyone have any information on them? Looking for their general reputation, common issues with the boats/build quality.

See 2023 thread here

www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/Sailing/General/S-S-39?page=1

Saltiest1 used to have one (as featured in the thread) and maybe will respond..........

I have looked at S&S39s built by Prestige. Lovely well built boats all of them.

Which ones in particular? Magic boats to sail once set up to your liking and was very happy with mine. What would you like to know? The build of Kinya J my s&s39 was great. The only issues were not from fibreglass but rather a few poorly installed braces and fixtures which were original (1982) but easily fixed. The only osmosis occurred on the rudder after owning her for 6 years and that was a series of 10 cent sized subtle blisters. Beautiful boat to sail and the new owner is very happy with her.

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saltiest1 said..
Which ones in particular? Magic boats to sail once set up to your liking and was very happy with mine. What would you like to know? The build of Kinya J my s&s39 was great. The only issues were not from fibreglass but rather a few poorly installed braces and fixtures which were original (1982) but easily fixed. The only osmosis occurred on the rudder after owning her for 6 years and that was a series of 10 cent sized subtle blisters. Beautiful boat to sail and the new owner is very happy with her.

Hey, sorry for the extremely late reply - I was kind of expecting to get a notification when I got a response on this forum and its been a hectic couple of weeks so haven't had the time to actually get back on here and check until now!

Thank you for the swift replies. I'm grateful to have a former owner on here to give me some idea of what I'm looking at. The S&S 39s that I can see listed right now are as follows:
- Odyssey of Freemantle built 1999
- Magic built 1982
- Norlee 1980
- Sundance 1985 (though I can see this boat is now under offer)

2 of these explicitly state that they were built by Prestige Yachts WA, and some other older forums tat I can see suggest most if not all of these boats were likely built by this company. Essentially I was just wondering if there were any known issues with the yard or the boat (sounds like you never encountered much). Additionally do you know to what degree these were outfitted when originally sold? As in did they come with rigging/tackle/etc - or were they sold as plain hulls and then the individual buyers had to finalize them.

Thanks again for your input!