The SAIL Top 10 Best Boats

This was one of the easier picks for our judging team, though no two judges seemed fully agreed on what exactly it is that makes the deck and cockpit of the new Morris M52 so special. Nigel Calder cited the boat’s perfectly pitched sheerline. Peter Nielsen liked the judicious-but-opulent laid teak deck. Charles Doane waxed poetic over the modern interpretation of a traditional butterfly hatch

This is a new category to SAIL’s annual Best Boat’s award, and one we are happy to promote, given the state of the world’s environment and the fact that no other boat has ever gone so far to be “green” as the Eko 6.5. This 21-foot Classe Mini production boat is built using a new resin made from recycled soda bottles. Instead of gel coat, an eco-friendly paint keeps moisture out of the laminate

We were impressed by the potential of the 12 foot Topaz dinghy as well as by its existing features. The boat has developed quickly into an active racing class in Europe and it could do the same here, given proper organization and promotion. The Topaz is a generation beyond fiberglass in construction. The hull is rotomolded of polyethylene, a process that’s expensive to set up initially but

It looked as though this award would be a toss-up between a handsome pair of new cruising cats from France—the Lagoon 400 and Fountaine Pajot Lipari 41—until we stepped aboard the South African-built Leopard 38 and its twin, the Sunsail 384. It was immediately obvious that here was one of the best-executed sub-40-foot cruising catamarans we have yet seen.Although there is

Rod Johnstone’s latest design taps into a new market segment for the Rhode Island-based company: shoal-draft boats. The versatile J/95 has both twin rudders and a centerboard, neither of which has been seen on J/Boat before. With the ballasted board up the boat draws just 3 feet, while remaining perfectly controllable under full sail. The J/Boats performance ethos remains intact; the boat is

Catalina’s latest big cruising yacht met with a great reception at the Oakland Strictly Sail show in April; orders quickly went into double figures, which is no mean feat in this economy. Designer Gerry Douglas obviously enjoyed himself with this boat; it is packed with details and features gleaned from his decades of experience in design and building. The end result is a fine all-round sailing

John Charnley, founder of Discovery Yachts, is a circumnavigator whose vision of the ideal world-girdling yacht metamorphosed into the Discovery 55, a fast, strong, attractive and practical cruiser. It has now evolved yet again into the Discovery 50 catamaran, which is—not surprisingly—fast, strong, attractive and practical. Designed by Bill Dixon, who is known more for large high-end

No, the idea of putting a parallel, or biplane, rig on a catamaran is not in itself novel. Those with long memories will recall Crossbow, a 60-foot biplane cat that set a sailing speed record (36 knots) back in 1980. Younger sailors will refer to the ill-fated 120-foot Team Phillips that Pete Goss put together for The Race in 2000. A few adventurous souls have also installed such rigs on smaller

This boat, in a word, is clean. While there’s nothing knockout innovative about the Lutra Studio-designed X-Treme 25, it perfectly fulfills its design brief as a make-no-bones-about-it sportboat that can test sailors of all ability levels. The sexiest thing about this speed machine is its distinctive hull form. A modest chine runs forward from the transom to the chainplates and the forward