SAIL.SailMagazine

Established in 1993 on the Baltic coast of the former East Germany, Hanse Yachts has gone from strength to strength by building performance-oriented yachts at affordable prices. Having recently extended its production facilities, Hanse is now Germany’s second largest boat builder after Bavaria. All its boats are designed by Judel and Vrolijk, a renowned team of naval architects that has had input

Germany’s Bavaria Yachts, not long ago the 800-pound gorilla of European boatbuilding, took a pummeling during the recession. For years its philosophy of strict engineering practices and budget control had seen its value-priced cruising boats flying off the factory floor. By 2007 the factory was cranking out nearly 3,500 boats a year to feed a seemingly insatiable, mainly

Once, in the interests of research, I spent an afternoon bobbing around in a liferaft. Ever since, I’ve had an obsession with bilge pumps, because what I learned was this: I don’t ever want to spend time in a liferaft again. The discomfort was one thing, and should not be downplayed, but what really got to me was the sense of helplessness. A liferaft is a passive device, at the mercy of wind and

The words sleek and fast aren’t normally associated with the Prout name. Words like “sturdy” and “well-finished” more typically come to mind. Nonetheless, the new Prout 50SW is very different from the—how to say this diplomatically—peculiarly English Prouts of the 1980s and 1990s. The signature mast-aft rig of those earlier boats, with their tiny mainsails and huge jibs, is long gone, as is the