The €695,000 Vripack Trawler: A Decade-Old Steel Explorer With Her Ocean Papers Already Stamped
A CE Category A steel trawler with a 2020 refit and a genuinely thorough 2025 maintenance programme behind her. What €695,000 buys, and what it does not.
There is a particular red she is painted in that you do not see often on a trawler hull, a deep oxblood rather than the navy or black that dominates this category, and it works because it does not try to hide what she is. She sits low and purposeful in the water, flybridge shaded, radar dome mounted high on the mast... The kind of profile that reads the same whether she is idling off a Turkish anchorage or working her way north through open water. Nothing about her silhouette suggests a coastal weekender. Everything about it suggests a vessel built to go somewhere and stay there for a while.
The vessel in question is a Vripack Trawler 1960, built in 2010 by Tufan & Brothers in Turkey, and she is currently offered at €695,000 through Sjoerd Paddenburg at De Valk Loosdrecht. At 19.60 metres LOA with a 5.60-metre beam and 1.50-metre draught, she displaces 57.5 tonnes, a figure that tells you immediately this is a genuine displacement platform rather than a semi-displacement hull wearing a trawler’s clothes. She carries CE Category A certification, the ocean-going classification, and that single fact does more work in this price bracket than almost anything else on the specification sheet.
Vripack’s naval architecture needs little introduction to anyone who follows this category closely. The Dutch studio, founded in 1961, effectively defined the modern trawler yacht through Dick Boon’s original Doggersbank design, and every vessel carrying the Vripack name since has inherited that same underlying logic: displacement hull forms, practical deck arrangements and a design philosophy that prioritises seakeeping. What makes this particular example interesting is where she was built. Tufan & Brothers is a Turkish yard with a growing reputation of its own, most recently announcing a 40-metre superyacht project at their Tuzla facility, and steel construction of this kind, executed to Vripack’s specification outside the Netherlands, has become an increasingly common route to genuine Dutch design pedigree at a materially lower build cost.
The hull itself is a multi hard chine configuration in steel, painted that distinctive red, with a woodcore superstructure sitting above it. That combination, steel below the waterline and a lighter composite structure above, is a deliberate weight-management decision rather than a compromise. It keeps the vessel’s centre of gravity low, which matters directly for stability and roll characteristics, while avoiding the added upkeep burden of steel plating in areas of the vessel that see the most sun, salt and general wear. It is standard practice across this category of build, but it is worth understanding precisely because it shapes what a surveyor will be looking at closely, and where.
Propulsion comes from twin John Deere 6068TFM diesels, rated at 225hp (165.6kW) each and turning through Twin Disc 5061 gearboxes at a 2.43:1 reduction ratio onto fixed five-blade stainless propellers. The 6068TFM is a genuinely commercial-grade platform, built by John Deere for workboats, fishing vessels and long-duty trawler applications as much as for pleasure craft, and it carries the parts availability and dealer network reach that comes with an engine built primarily for people who cannot afford downtime. At 1,500 hours on the clock, these are engines still well inside their useful service life. Cruising at 9 knots against a maximum of 10, she burns approximately 24 litres per hour combined, giving a range of 1,130 nautical miles, figures that place her comfortably within genuine coastal and short-ocean passage-making capability rather than marina-to-marina cruising alone.
She has not sat idle either. In 2020 she went through a comprehensive cosmetic and structural refresh: hull, superstructure and exterior fully repainted, teak surfaces refurbished or renewed, interior ceilings replaced, and the engine room stripped and repainted with all mechanical parts serviced or changed. That alone would be a reasonable maintenance story for a vessel of this age. What sets this listing apart, in my opinion, is what happened in 2025. A genuinely substantial follow-up programme covering hull thickness gauging, a full bottom strip and repaint, shaft seal and bearing renewal, underwater light replacement and a complete recarpeting throughout. Taken together, that is not routine annual servicing. That is the kind of pre-sale preparation that normally shows up as a survey finding list, already actioned before the vessel ever reached the market.
This article continues below, in “The Wardroom”
In the premium section, I cover:
- The engine room in full: what 1,500 hours on the John Deere 6068TFM actually means for remaining service life, and what the Twin Disc gearbox and 2025 shaft seal renewal tell you about how she has been run
- The 2025 maintenance programme, line by line: what hull thickness gauging results should tell a buyer before survey, and why a full bottom strip the same year is unusual to see already completed
- The generators, the watermaker and the electrical system: twin ONAN 13.5kW sets both sitting at exactly 3,000 hours, what that pattern suggests about how she has been operated, and the Mastervolt system behind them
- My honest assessment of €695,000: how she compares against the wider Category A steel trawler market at this size, and what that price genuinely buys against what it does not
The Wardroom
The Engine Room in Full
