Overview
The Reinke 13M is a German aluminum twin-keel expedition cruiser designed by Kurt Reinke, who founded his own design practice (Reinke-Yachtbau) in 1971 after working as technical manager at Abeking & Rasmussen and contributing towing-tank work to 12-Metre America’s Cup development at Britton Chance Jr.‘s office. Like Bruce Roberts’ steel designs already in this catalog, Reinke sold the 13M as construction plans rather than building it himself: hundreds of hulls across his full design range were built by home builders, professional craftsmen, and shipyards alike, including at least one named professional yard, Rehberger Yachts of Bremen.
The twin-keel arrangement gives a shoal, load-bearing draft of 4.43 ft with no moving parts, a genuinely different tradeoff from this initiative’s other lifting-centerboard designs (Ovni, Garcia, Boreal, Allures): the boat can dry out upright on a falling tide or grounding without a retraction mechanism to maintain, at the cost of some upwind performance compared to a deep fin. Reinke’s plans also offered a fixed fin-keel option for this same hull, deeper (5.25 ft) but lighter, a real alternate configuration this file does not separately catalog.
Design and Construction
At roughly 26,000 lb displacement with a 47 percent ballast ratio, the 13M is a heavier, more heavily ballasted boat than most of this initiative’s French centerboard designs. Its rig is described by sailboatdata.com as “Solent,” a double-headsail arrangement with a fixed inner forestay set close to the outer one, functionally closer to a cutter’s two-headsail flexibility than a single-headsail sloop, though not identical to either.
Under Sail
No independently verified ocean passage was confirmed for this specific model in this research pass. Sailboatdata.com’s own designer profile describes Reinke’s aluminum and steel designs as long-established choices among long-distance sailors, and a specific 2001 Reinke 13M Special, SV Gjoa, was confirmed via the owners’ own blog to be actively cruised from 2017 onward. Search results also surfaced claims of an extensive Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific voyage associated with the Gjoa name, but the blog entries describing that voyage predate the 2017 purchase of this specific hull and appear to concern a different, earlier boat owned by the same sailors, so that claim is not used as evidence here.
Buyers Notes
As with any aluminum hull, electrolysis and stray-current corrosion are the main long-term maintenance concern, worth checking anode condition and history closely on survey. Because Reinke sold construction plans directly to both professional yards and home builders, build quality varies hull to hull more than on a single-yard production boat; identifying the actual builder of a specific used hull, and having welding, wiring, and finish quality surveyed on their own merits, matters more here than usual.
