N60

A stretched N55, not a new hull

Nordhavn built the N60 by lengthening the N55, one of its best-selling models, rather than starting a new design. The extra five feet went almost entirely into the cockpit and lazarette, giving owners more room for diving gear, fishing tackle and dockside entertaining, and letting the boat deck carry a bigger tender, sea kayaks or jet skis than the N55 could manage on the same footprint.

The stretch also lengthened the waterline, which Nordhavn and independent reviewers both credit with a speed gain of roughly a third of a knot and a real improvement in range over the N55. The first hull was delivered in 2009, and Nordhavn's own press pages show hull number 75 (Morning Dew) commissioned in December 2018 and hull number 79 (Rainbow's End) delivered in October 2020, a build rate of roughly two hulls a year that has kept the model in continuous production for close to two decades. Nordhavn later used the same N60 hull as the base for the more contemporary-styled N625, but the N60 itself has stayed in the lineup for buyers who want the older, more customizable platform.

One hull, two propulsion paths

A buyer ordering an N60 chooses between two genuinely different engine rooms on the same hull. The standard single-engine boat runs one John Deere 6090AFM85 diesel, rated 325 hp at 2,300 rpm, turning a single shaft, backed by a separate wing engine on its own shaft and fuel supply purely as a get-home backup (Nordhavn Yachts official specification, cross-checked against BoatTEST's and itboat's independently published spec sheets, both of which list the same 325 hp John Deere main engine and a 100 hp wing engine on the standard boat).

The alternative is a twin-engine boat with no dedicated wing engine at all, each main engine acting as the other's backup instead. Julia II, a 2015 hull sold through Nordhavn's own brokerage, was built this way, with twin Lugger 1066T-165hp engines rather than a single main plus a small wing unit. Which path suits a buyer is really a question of redundancy philosophy: one engine plus a separate low-load wing engine, or two engines sharing the full load and standing in for each other if one fails. Nordhavn builds both to order on the identical hull.

Nordhavn did not draw a new boat when it wanted a 60-footer. It stretched its best-selling N55 by five feet, kept everything that worked, and let the extra waterline buy the range instead.

8 knots, a full-displacement hull, and a range that depends on who is quoting it

Cruising speed on the single-engine N60 sits at 8 to 8.7 knots, with a top speed just under 10, numbers set by the full-displacement hull rather than by horsepower. BoatTEST's 2020 sea trial recorded 9.8 knots at 2,200 rpm burning 16 gallons an hour, and 8.7 knots at 1,800 rpm burning 8.7 gallons an hour, though the crew noted the main engine's own instrument display was stuck in diagnostic mode during the run, so those fuel figures came from the boat's other gauges rather than a clean factory readout.

Range is reported differently depending on who measured it and at what speed, and none of the figures actually disagree once the speed is accounted for. BoatTEST's 8.7-knot fuel burn works out to just under 2,250 nm on the standard 2,250-gallon tank; HMY Yachts' powerboat guide cites 2,500-plus miles at 8 knots; and Nordhavn's own brokerage listing for Julia II states 3,000 nm at 7.5 knots. Rather than pick one, the honest summary is a boat that clears an ocean at passagemaking speed, with the exact number falling as the throttle rises, exactly as it does on every full-displacement Nordhavn.

What reviewers who have actually been aboard say

Nick Burnham, who writes and films as Aquaholic for YachtBuyer and has three decades in yacht journalism, reviewed the N60 and came away most impressed by its engineering redundancy and its genuinely accessible engine room, singling out the dual autopilots, dual VHF radios and side-mounted stabilizers as the kind of belt-and-braces engineering that makes a long passage boring in the best way. He found no significant fault with the boat in his review, which is itself worth noting given how frankly he has criticized other yachts on the same channel.

Peter Janssen, a journalist who has spent extended time aboard Nordhavns since crewing a Nordhavn 57 across the Atlantic during the 2004 Nordhavn Atlantic Rally, reviewed the N60 for Cruising Odyssey and focused on livability rather than engineering: a professional, 360-degree-visibility pilothouse positioned amidships where motion is least, a salon and galley that feel like a small house rather than a boat, and an owner's stateroom with a proper shower and bathtub. His main point of comparison was the N55 the N60 replaced in his affections, crediting the stretch with turning a 1,500 nm boat into one that reaches 3,000 nm at reduced throttle without changing anything else a returning owner would recognize.

What owning one actually costs

Nordhavn does not publish a base price for the N60, and every current listing bears that out: the yard's own 2026 factory hull on YachtWorld is marked simply "Request price," and an Australian dealer's 2023 new-build listing carries the same policy as "POA Base price." Every new N60 is quoted against the buyer's engine choice, single or twin, and the equipment list on top of it, so there is no single confirmed figure to compare against a competing builder.

The used market is genuinely active for a boat this size: nine N60s were listed simultaneously on YachtWorld in September 2026, spanning a 2010 hull at $1,750,000 down to a 2014 hull at $975,000 in Milwaukee, up to a 2022 hull at $2,750,000 in Charleston, a wider spread than the handful-a-year markets seen on Nordhavn's larger models. A 2016 hull named Stardrifter was independently listed at $1,600,000 on both YachtWorld and boats.com, the same figure on two separate marketplaces. No model-specific annual running cost is published anywhere in these sources, so a buyer should treat any percentage-of-value rule of thumb as a rough industry guess rather than an N60-specific number until a broker confirms it for a particular hull.

What to check before buying a used one

Because Nordhavn builds the N60 to order, real delivered hulls vary from the base spec more than the brochure numbers suggest. Wing engine ratings alone span from a 65 hp Lugger L-944D on the brokerage listing for Door Prize to 165 hp Lugger units on the twin-engine Julia II, and generator setups range from Nordhavn's standard single 20 kW Northern Lights set to twin-generator pairs (20 kW plus 9 kW on Door Prize, 20 kW plus 12 kW on Julia II) that owners added for redundancy at anchor.

The same pattern holds for stabilizers and thrusters: TRAC 250-series fins appear as the base fit on both Door Prize and Julia II, but other hulls carry larger TRAC 300 or 370-series units, and Nordhavn's own 15 hp electric bow thruster is commonly upgraded on delivered boats to a larger hydraulic bow-and-stern pair, 25 hp on Door Prize's listing. A watermaker is not universal either; Door Prize carries a Spectra Newport 400, but that is one hull's equipment list, not a standard fitment. None of this is a defect in the boat, it is the cost of a semi-custom build, but it means a serious buyer has to read the specific hull's equipment list rather than trust the model's base spec sheet.

Para quién es: An experienced owner-operator couple who want more cockpit, lazarette and range than the Nordhavn 55 offers, without moving up to the larger and more expensive N62 or N63.