Overview
The Golden Hind 31 is a Maurice Griffiths design built to a shoal-draft, full-keel-with-bilge-plates formula meant for drying out upright on a mooring or a beach. Griffiths drew it in 1965 for Hartwells, a Plymouth coffin manufacturer trying its hand at boatbuilding, and the design went on to become one of the more travelled small bluewater cruisers to come out of Britain, at one point reportedly holding the record for the most Atlantic crossings by a production sailboat.
History
Hartwells built the first Golden Hinds in marine plywood, and the design’s popularity led their yard manager, Terry Erskine, to take over production in the early 1970s and switch to fiberglass hulls with a wood deck and cabinhouse. Terry Erskine Yachts built the majority of the roughly 250-plus hulls produced through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, when the yard closed. Production resumed briefly in 1995 under Golden Hind Marine, using Erskine’s original moulds to build a smaller run of a more modern Mark II before the tooling was sold on to Newson Boatbuilders in 2006. Sources disagree on this boat’s displacement and ballast: Baldwin’s list gives figures (13,500 lb displacement, 5,100 lb ballast) that line up closely with the later Mark II, while independent spec databases put the original model at 11,600 lb displacement on 4,100 lb ballast, the figures used in this entry’s frontmatter.
Construction
The fiberglass-hulled boats have a solid laminate double-chine hull with mahogany cabinhouse sides, and a deck and coachroof framed in hardwood, sheathed with cloth and epoxy. Cast-iron ballast is fully encapsulated in the full keel, and bilge plates are through-bolted to a steel support frame inside the hull, letting the boat take the ground and stand upright rather than falling on its side, a genuinely useful feature for anyone cruising drying harbours or beaching for maintenance. Plywood-hulled originals from the Hartwells era have not aged as well as the fiberglass boats and need closer scrutiny for rot.
Under Sail
James Baldwin summed up the tradeoff directly: “good boat if you need shoal draft and ability to stand the boat upright on its bilge keel plates,” but “if you don’t particularly need the shallow draft, the bilge plates along with full keel add drag reducing sailing efficiency.” That is the whole character of the boat. The shoal draft and drying capability are real advantages for anyone who wants them, at a real cost in windward performance and speed compared with a deeper, cleaner-keeled design of the same length.
Buyers Notes
Baldwin also recorded 6’2“ of headroom as a strong point for a 31-footer of this vintage. Griffiths designed the boat to be rigged as either sloop or cutter, so buyers will find both configurations on the used market; check which rig a given boat carries and whether it has been changed from original. Given the mixed construction history, plywood originals versus fiberglass Erskine-built boats versus the later Golden Hind Marine Mark II, a buyer should first establish which era and builder produced a specific hull, since the displacement, ballast and rig can all differ meaningfully between them. Deck coring, the condition of the bilge plate through-bolts and support frame, and (on any plywood original) hull moisture are the priority survey items.
