Catalina 22

The Catalina 22 is a boat you can own with a driveway, a trailer hitch, and a modest tolerance for weekend wrenching. This book is written for exactly that owner: the person who launches from a ramp, does the work themselves, and wants straight answers about a boat that was built in the thousands and modified by nearly everyone who touched one.

More than 15,000 Catalina 22s were built between 1969 and the mid-1990s, which makes yours one of the most-produced sailboats in history (source: en.wikipedia.org). That is good news and a small headache. The good news is that parts, class support, and hard-won owner knowledge are everywhere. The headache is that "a Catalina 22" is not one boat. It is a family of closely related boats spread across twenty-five years of production, three different keels, an optional raising roof, and a great deal of previous-owner creativity. Before this book can help you maintain, repair, or upgrade your boat, you and I need to agree on which Catalina 22 you actually have.

So that is where we start. Nail down your hull, and every chapter that follows lands on the right details instead of the wrong ones.

1.1 This is a trailer-sailer, and this is a DIY book

The Catalina 22 was designed by Frank V. Butler as Catalina Yachts' very first model, and its whole reason for existing was trailerability. The retracting keel and the deck-stepped mast on a pivoting tabernacle mean one or two people can rig, launch, sail, recover, and tow the boat home the same day. The full package, boat plus trailer, comes in around 2,500 lb, which "most cars" can tow, though a tow package and some caution are wise for longer hauls (source: practical-sailor.com).

That trailer-sailer nature shapes the entire approach of this book. There is no inboard engine: auxiliary power is a transom-hung outboard, and the chapter on power treats it that way. There is no paid crew and, on a boat worth what a used Catalina 22 is worth, usually no paid surveyor either. A professional survey can cost a meaningful fraction of the boat's value, so the norm on this boat is that you are the surveyor, armed with a moisture meter, a plastic mallet, and a flashlight. This book is written to put those tools in your hands rather than to send you to a yard for every job.

1.2 Step one: identify YOUR boat

There are four questions that sort out which Catalina 22 you own. Answer them before you read another chapter.

1. Which keel? (This changes everything)

Three keels were offered across the production run, and which one is bolted or hung under your hull is the single most important fact about your boat. It sets the draft, the trailer weight, the sailing manners, and, above all, the maintenance burden.

• Swing keel (also called a centerboard keel): a rough cast-iron casting of roughly 450 to 550 lb that pivots up into a trunk inside the hull. Draft is about 5.0 ft with the keel down and just 1 ft 8 in with it raised (source: en.wikipedia.org). This is the true trailer-sailer configuration, the one that "virtually created the trailer-sailer market," and it was chosen by roughly 90% of buyers (source: practical-sailor.com). It is also the one with the defining maintenance system described below.
• Fixed fin keel: a bolted-on fin drawing about 3 ft 6 in, with the best windward pointing of the three. It needs deeper water to launch and float but skips the entire swing-keel mechanism.
• Wing keel: a shoal-draft bulbed keel drawing about 2 ft 6 in, introduced with the mid-1980s redesign. It is the most forgiving on draft and the poorest at pointing. Note that it is not class-legal to retrofit a wing keel onto an older hull (source: catalina22.org).

The shorthand: swing keel launches shallowest and hauls easiest but carries the most mechanism to maintain; fin points best but wants deep water; wing splits the difference on draft. Best pointing to worst runs fin, then swing, then wing.

2. Which generation? (The naming is genuinely tangled) [CONFLICT]

Here honesty matters more than tidiness, because the sources do not agree, and anyone who tells you the generations are simple is selling something. What everyone agrees on:

• Old-style / "Mark I" / original (1969 to the mid-1980s): the classic boat, with exterior teak, a taller rig, and swing or fixed-fin keel.
• The "New Design" (from 1986, beginning around hull number 13,143): a shorter mast, the added wing-keel option, smoked-plexiglass port lights in place of aluminum-trimmed ones, a relocated forward hatch, and, importantly, a separate above-deck fuel locker (source: en.wikipedia.org).
• The 1995-onward boat with a longer cabin trunk, a beam widened about 8 in, teak eliminated, and a more spacious, cruising-oriented interior (source: sailingmagazine.net).

Where the sources fight is the "Mark" numbering. Wikipedia and Catalina's own usage call the 1995 longer-cabin boat the "Mark II." Sailing magazine instead calls the 1986 boat the "Mark II" and the 1995 boat the "Mark III." The class association sidesteps the whole argument and speaks only of "old-style" versus "new-style," with the split at the 1985/1986 model change [CONFLICT]. In this book, "Mark II" means the 1995-onward, longer-cabin boat, and the key practical dividing line for parts and inspection is pre-1986 versus 1986-on. If you are ordering parts, order by year and hull number, never by a "Mark" label alone, and verify against the boat in front of you.

3. Pop-top or not?

The pop-top, introduced in 1973, is the raising cabin roof that lifts the coachroof about 10 in on four stainless struts, taking standing headroom from 4 ft 4 in up to 5 ft 7 in at anchor (source: practical-sailor.com). Roughly 90% of boats have it. It is a genuine comfort at the dock and a genuine source of leaks, so knowing whether yours has one, and in what condition its gasket is, matters for both living aboard and keeping water out of the deck.

4. Outboard auxiliary

Your Catalina 22 has no inboard. Auxiliary power is a portable outboard on a bracket at the port quarter of the transom, typically a long-shaft motor in the 3.5 to 6 hp range on a portable 6-gallon tank (source: whichsailboat.com). One safety-relevant wrinkle of vintage: pre-1986 boats stowed the fuel tank inside the cabin, a flaw later corrected with a dedicated, vented cockpit fuel locker (source: practical-sailor.com). If you have an early boat, this is worth addressing.

1.3 The one system to check first [SAFETY]

If you own a swing-keel boat, understand this before you sail it: that half-ton of cast iron is held up and controlled by a small chain of wear parts, and every link deserves your attention. The keel pivots on a pivot pin carried in keel hanger castings, and it is raised and lowered by a wire pennant (the keel cable) running over a turning ball to a winch. The known failures are real, not theoretical: pivot holes that corrode and wallow out until the keel slops side to side; hanger bolts found sheared or missing; cables that part; and cracked, leaking keel trunks where the lock-bolt plate separates from the box. There are documented cases of swing-keel boats sinking from a failed cable and of keels tearing out the bottom of the hull (source: forums.sailboatowners.com).

The practical rule: before every launch, get under the boat on the trailer, about a foot aft of the keel's leading edge, and confirm all four hanger bolts are present, tight, and not rusted or sheared (source: forums.sailboatowners.com). Inspect the pivot, cable, eye bolt, turning ball, winch, and cable hose on a schedule. The maintenance chapter walks the whole chain in detail. This is the boat's defining system, and it is the reason a swing-keel Catalina 22 rewards an owner who inspects and neglects an owner who does not.

1.4 Know-your-hull checklist

Fill this in before going further. Every later chapter assumes you know these answers.

• Keel type: swing / fixed fin / wing (crawl under and look; do not assume).
• Model year and hull number: read the hull identification number; this settles pre-1986 versus 1986-on and orders the right parts.
• Pop-top: yes / no, and gasket condition.
• Fuel tank location: in-cabin (pre-1986) or vented cockpit locker.
• Outboard: horsepower, shaft length (long-shaft preferred), and bracket condition.
• Trailer: present and roadworthy, or not (inspect it like a second boat).

1.5 A word on liability, owner to owner

I have tried to make this book accurate, honest, and specific to the Catalina 22 you actually own. But I have never seen your boat, your keel, your rigging, or your trailer, and the figures here are drawn from decades of varied production and heavy owner modification. Treat every number as a starting point to verify against your own hull, not as gospel. Where sources conflict, I have flagged it and given you both readings rather than a false certainty. Sailing, trailering, and working under a suspended half-ton keel carry real risk to life and property, and the responsibility for doing any of it safely rests with you. When a job is beyond your tools or your confidence, or when a safety-critical part is in question, get a qualified professional involved. This book is a knowledgeable companion for a capable owner. It is not a substitute for your own judgment, and it is not a warranty. With that understood, let us go figure out your boat.

The Catalina 22 is the boat that taught a generation how to go sailing. It was small enough to tow behind the family car, cheap enough to own on an ordinary paycheck, and forgiving enough to learn on without scaring anyone off the water. More than fifteen thousand of them were built, which makes it one of the most-produced sailboats in history, and it is fair to say it did more than any other single design to invent the modern trailer-sailer. This chapter is the story of where your boat came from, how it changed over roughly a quarter century of production, and why it earned the loyalty it still commands today.

2.1 One man, one hundred boats, and a very wrong guess

The Catalina 22 was the first model built by Catalina Yachts, and it came off the line in July 1969 in North Hollywood, California. It was designed by Frank V. Butler, the founder of the company, and by every account it was a modest bet. Butler reportedly hoped to build 100 boats "if all went well." He was wrong by more than two orders of magnitude.

By February 1975, hull number 5,000 was complete. By September 1980, hull number 10,000 rolled out, and the boat was by then being produced at plants on both the East and West Coasts of the United States, with licensed or related production also running in England, Australia, and Canada. In 1986, hull number 13,143 began a revised run that the factory called the "New Design." Somewhere around 1994 to 1995, production passed roughly 15,000 hulls. [CONFLICT] One later source states that hull number 15,000 was delivered in February 1990 rather than the mid-1990s; the milestone dates for the 5,000 / 10,000 / 13,143 hulls are well corroborated, but treat the exact date of the 15,000th boat as unverified until you can confirm it against a factory record.

The headline number itself carries a small [CONFLICT]. Different reputable sources put lifetime production at "more than 15,000," at "over 16,000," or at "over 15,000 units." The honest, defensible phrasing (and the one this book uses) is more than 15,000 hulls. Whichever figure is exactly right, the point is the same: this is one of the best-selling sailboats ever made, and it has been recognized as such. The design was named one of the inaugural members of the American Sailboat Hall of Fame, and it is routinely described as the most commercially successful cruising sailboat of its size.

If you own one of these boats, you are holding a piece of production history. That matters for more than bragging rights, and we will come back to why: the sheer volume is the reason parts, knowledge, and community for your boat are still, decades later, remarkably easy to find.

2.2 What made it different: the trailer-sailer idea

To understand why the Catalina 22 mattered, you have to picture the market it landed in. In 1969, a "cruising sailboat," even a small one, mostly meant a boat that lived in the water, at a mooring or a slip you paid for month after month. Sailing was something you did if you had somewhere to keep a boat.

The Catalina 22 attacked that assumption from three directions at once, and all three reinforced each other.

The first was trailerability. The boat was engineered from the start to be towed. Fully rigged for the road, boat and trailer together weigh in the neighborhood of 2,500 lb, light enough to be pulled by "most cars," though a vehicle with a tow package is the sensible choice for any long haul. The key that unlocked this was the swing keel, a cast-iron keel that pivots up into a trunk inside the hull. With the swing keel retracted, draft drops to about 1 ft 8 in, shallow enough to float the boat off a trailer at a public ramp. Practical Sailor credits the design with having "virtually created the trailer-sailer market," and that is not marketing language, it is a fair reading of what happened. Suddenly the boat did not need a slip. It could live in your driveway and sail a different lake every weekend.

The second was affordability and simplicity. One period description called it "a simple boat providing the basic essentials for first-time sailors or budget-strapped families," and that was exactly the target. There is no inboard engine to buy, winterize, or repair. Auxiliary power is a small outboard hung on the transom. The systems are few and the boat is honest about what it is. For a family stretching to afford a sailboat at all, that simplicity was the whole appeal.

The third was community and class support. This one compounds over time. Because so many were sold, an entire ecosystem grew up around the boat: an active class association, one-design racing fleets across the country, and a parts pipeline that never dried up. When you buy into a boat with 15,000 siblings, you are also buying into every question that has already been asked and answered by the owners ahead of you.

Put those three together and you get the definitive affordable trailerable. Plenty of boats have been one of those things. The Catalina 22 was all three at a price ordinary people could reach, and it arrived at the exact moment the country was ready for it.

2.3 The pop-top: the boat's signature trick

If the swing keel is the Catalina 22's defining feature under the water, the pop-top is its signature feature above it.

Introduced in 1973, the pop-top is a section of the cabin roof that lifts up on four stainless-steel pipe legs, raising the coachroof by roughly 10 inches. The payoff is headroom. With the top down, standing headroom in the cabin is about 4 ft 4 in, which means you are stooping. With the top up, it becomes about 5 ft 7 in, which for most people is the difference between crouching and standing up to cook, change, or move around at anchor. On a boat this small, that is a genuinely clever piece of design, and buyers agreed: roughly 90% of boats sold were fitted with it.

Be honest with yourself about its limits, because owners are. The pop-top is meant for use at anchor or at the dock, not underway, and raising it costs you some structure and storage. It is a fair-weather, at-rest luxury, not a sailing configuration. Later boats improved the mechanism: the Mark II switched the pop-top from pipe struts to hinges for easier operation, and the aftermarket now offers gas-spring lift kits that cut the initial lifting effort dramatically. But the basic idea has been the same since 1973, and it remains one of the most beloved quirks of the class.

2.4 The series: old-style, New Design, and Mark II

Here is where you need to slow down, because the naming of the Catalina 22's generations is genuinely confusing, and the sources do not agree with each other. This is a real [CONFLICT], and rather than pretend it is settled, this book will lay it out plainly and then tell you the convention it follows.

The problem is simple: the boat evolved in stages over about 25 years, and different writers have hung different "Mark" numbers on those stages. The class association, the Catalina 22 National Sailing Association (C22NSA), avoids Mark numbers entirely and uses the plainer language "old-style" and "new-style" instead. That is arguably the safest vocabulary of all. Here is the evolution as best it can be reconciled.

The original boat (1969 to the mid-1980s). Variously called the "Mark I" or the "old-style" boat, this is the classic Catalina 22: exterior teak trim, a taller rig, and a choice of the swing keel or a fixed fin keel. This is the boat most people picture, and versions of the base hull were reportedly produced in parallel right up until 1995, which tells you the later revisions were updates to the same fundamental boat rather than clean-sheet redesigns.

The "New Design" (1986 onward, from hull number 13,143). The C22NSA calls this the "new-style" hull. The changes were meaningful but evolutionary: a shorter mast, the addition of a wing keel option (a shoal-draft keel with bulbed wings, drawing about 2 ft 6 in, offered from 1988), smoked-plexiglass port lights in place of the older aluminum-trimmed ones, interior layout changes, a separate fuel locker and battery compartment, a forward hatch relocated from the foredeck to the cabin house, and an added anchor locker. Importantly, while the rigging was revised, the sail dimensions were unchanged. This is the update that fixed one of the original boat's real flaws: early boats stowed the portable fuel tank inside the cabin, and the New Design finally gave it a proper dedicated locker.

The "Mark II" (1995 onward, around hull number 15,344). This is the longer-cabin, more cruising-oriented boat: a longer cabin trunk, beam widened by about 8 inches, exterior teak eliminated, a more modern and roomier interior, a straighter bow-pulpit rail, and a heavier overall boat. That extra weight made it less competitive in one-design racing but a more comfortable cruiser. You will sometimes see the Mark II listed with a length overall of about 23 ft 8 in in specification databases, but do not be fooled: the hull is essentially the same length as before, and the longer figure comes from the bow pulpit and anchor-roller overhang, not from a longer boat.

Now the [CONFLICT] itself, stated plainly. One well-regarded source (sailingmagazine.net) calls the 1986 boat the "Mark II" and the 1995 boat the "Mark III." Other sources, including Wikipedia and Catalina's own general usage, treat 1995 as the Mark II. The C22NSA, as noted, sidesteps the whole argument with "old-style versus new-style." This book adopts the convention that "Mark II" means the 1995-onward, longer-cabin boat, and flags the ambiguity so you are not caught out when a seller, a forum post, or a parts catalog uses the numbers differently. When it matters (and for ordering parts, it matters a great deal), do not trust the Mark number at all: use your hull number and model year, which is how the specialist vendors actually break their catalogs down.

There is one more chapter to the story, though it falls outside this book's core scope. In 2004, Catalina introduced the Catalina 22 Sport (around hull number 15,540), a reissue of the original swing-keel daysailer concept with a modern Selden spar, lighter and simpler, aimed squarely back at daysailing and one-design racing. If your boat is a Classic 22 from the 1969-to-1995 run, the Sport is a cousin, not your boat, but you will see it referenced in the community and occasionally in shared parts listings.

2.5 A racing class and a trailering culture

Numbers built a boat; owners built a movement. By 1994, there were roughly 70 one-design racing fleets for the Catalina 22 across the United States. One-design racing is the great equalizer: everyone sails the same boat, so the racing tests the sailor rather than the checkbook, and the swing keel and fixed fin keel boats are even allowed to race together as one class. That accessibility is a big part of why so many fleets took root, and why Sail magazine singled the boat out as a top small cruiser for trailering.

The class is governed by the C22NSA, and calling it merely "active" undersells it. The association has served owners for more than 50 years. It is organized into 12 regions with local fleets and clubs, and it has run a National Championship Regatta for more than 40 years (the 2025 Nationals, for example, were sailed at Lake Worth Sailing Club in Fort Worth, Texas). [UNVERIFIED] Reports from the early 2010s put the association at roughly 63 active fleets and around 550 members, so treat those as order-of-magnitude figures rather than a current census, but the direction they point in is unmistakable: this is one of the strongest small-boat class associations in the sport.

For an owner, the real crown jewel is the technical archive. The association's newsletter, MainBrace, has been published since Fall 1972. It maintains a Technical Article Guide indexing more than 700 owner-written technical articles, and a Catalina 22 Technical Manual running past 700 pages. There is very little you can wonder about this boat that someone in this community has not already documented in detail.

That culture spills well beyond racing. Because the boat trailers so easily, its owners are cruisers of a particular, restless kind: they haul to a new lake or coast for a long weekend, rig on the ramp, sail, and tow home. The boat is widely regarded as one that one or two people can rig and launch themselves, with the mast deck-stepped in a tabernacle and often raised single-handed using a gin pole. A crew of two is plenty to sail it. This is a boat built around the idea that sailing should fit into an ordinary life, and the community that formed around it reflects exactly that.

2.6 Honest about what it is

None of this makes the Catalina 22 a thoroughbred, and the people who know it best would be the first to say so. Practical Sailor called it "hardly a sprightly performer," and that is not an insult, it is the design brief. Every choice in the boat is a compromise among trailerability, shoal draft, cockpit room, and price. It sails best in light-to-medium air. Its construction has known soft spots, including a hull-to-deck joint that the same reviewers consider merely adequate for a boat this size. The swing keel that makes it so trailerable also brings its own maintenance list, from keel cables to hanger bolts, which later chapters cover in full.

But the Catalina 22 was never trying to be the fastest or the best-built boat on the water. It was trying to put a real, capable, trailerable cruising sailboat within reach of an ordinary family, and to make owning one easy enough that they would stick with it. Judged against that goal, it is one of the most successful sailboats ever designed. More than 15,000 families agreed, and the community they built is still going strong. That is the boat you own, and understanding what it was built to do is the first step to getting the most out of it.