SAIL.SailMagazine

At first I couldn’t help asking myself whether the sailboat market really needs another high-strung IRC racer-cruiser like the Aquila RP45. But one look at this carefully engineered, well-built racer was all it took to answer that question with an emphatic yes. 

South African yard Robertson & Caine has been a major force in the cruising multihull market ever since linking with charter giant The Moorings a decade ago. Its latest design is the Leopard 58, which will be known as the Moorings 5800 when in charter livery.

The announcement of a new boat from Nautor’s Swan is always a red letter day in the big-boat world, and designer German Frers Jr. was typically upbeat about the yard’s latest creation at an informal pre-launch party at the New York Yacht Club.

When Oyster founder Richard Matthews sold the company a few years ago, it was a safe bet that he wouldn’t be able to resist the siren call of boatbuilding for long. The Gunfleet 58 is the second design from Matthews’s new company, Gunfleet Marine.

Sometimes you need more living space than the average 100-foot monohull can provide. That’s when you turn to a boat like this Van Peteghem – Lauriot Prevost (VPLP) designed supercat.