The SAIL Top 10 Best Boats

Although it can be easily singlehanded, the 9ft 8in TAZ, from Topper International, can handle an adult and child, making it ideal for training or parent/offspring daysails. Better still, this is a boat with a Bermudian rig that both prepares beginners for the rigs they will be handling as adolescents and adapts to their needs as they develop as sailors. Specifically, the basic rig flies a

This year, we decided to create a special category for the elegant daysailer. These boats don’t fit in the cruising or performance boats categories, and it’s a shame to leave such beautiful crafts unacknowledged. There was a strong field this year, but our judges were unanimous in electing the C.W. Hood 32 as the one that stood out above the rest. With its long, lean hull, sweeping overhangs,

One thing we particularly like about this boat is that it reminds us there are many different ways to go cruising. A shoal-draft sharpie based loosely on a boat designed in 1885, the Presto 30 is a very modern reinterpretation of a very traditional archetype. A simple, trailerable, beachable boat that is fast, fun and easy to sail, it also has an enclosed head, a dedicated galley and enough berth

During the glory days of British boatbuilding, the Moody brand was always front and center. The yard, near the head of the iconic River Hamble on England’s south coast, began building workboats in the 1820s, branched into yachtbuilding in the 1930s, and remained in the Moody family’s hands until 2007, when the brand was bought by Hanse Yachts proprietor Michael Schmidt and the

Never mind the economy — it’s business as usual in the boating game. Well, not quite. Everyone in the marine trade is feeling the financial pinch these days, so it’s even more impressive that so many new boats have been developed and readied in time for the fall boat show season. What this year’s line-up of new models—everything from dinghies to multi-million-dollar world cruisers—tells me is

Cast your mind back to a time when a 45-footer was about the biggest boat you could expect from a mass-production builder. It wasn’t all that long ago—the mid-1990s. Then Beneteau raised the bar with a 50-footer back in 1997, and boats that size and bigger are now commonplace.Still, size isn’t everything. Many sailors still find their dream boats in the 45-foot range. A 45-footer is big

Bill Schock, the founder of California-based W.D. Schock Corp., got a lot of things right in his time, not the least of which when he turned to his son Tom back in 1976 and said, “It’s a great little boat. Let’s build it.” In this way the Santana 20 was born with, as Tom recalls it, “no demographic studies, no market research, nothing. We didn’t know who we’d sell it to.”Thirty-five years