The SAIL Top 10 Best Boats

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

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

If there’s one lesson to be taken away from the success of the daysailer concept, it is that traditional is never old-fashioned—at least not when it comes to boats. I find plenty of modern boats attractive, but the only drop-dead, wolf-whistle gorgeous ones are those that look as though they could have been built at any time in the last century.I’m far from alone in this.

Eavesdropping on an in-depth discussion of rating rules will send a casual bystander into a deep sleep as effectively as any hypnotist, and IRC—the successor to IOR and IMS—is no exception to this, er, rule. All I can say with any kind of authority is that boats designed to IRC tend to be a good deal more interesting than the rule itself. Over the last few years we’ve seen a steady stream of IRC

The Class 40 began in 2004 as a scaled-down, less-expensive version of the Open 60 and Open 50 monohulls that are the darlings of professional shorthanded offshore racing in Europe. The idea was to give amateurs an affordable class that was a step up from the Mini Transat 6.5, but pros have since embraced the boat as well.In the 2006 Route du Rhum race from France to Guadeloupe, 25 Class

Multihulls have been around for a long time. The Chinese reportedly sailed double-hulled junks as early as 2700 BC, and ancient Polynesians used a variety of multi-hulled craft to colonize the South Pacific. The Englishman William Dampier was the first Westerner on record to use the word “catamaran” back in the 1690s during a trip through the Tamil region in Southern India. The word itself comes

Multihulls have been around for a long time. The Chinese reportedly sailed double-hulled junks as early as 2700 BC, and ancient Polynesians used a variety of multi-hulled craft to colonize the South Pacific. The Englishman William Dampier was the first Westerner on record to use the word “catamaran” back in the 1690s during a trip through the Tamil region in Southern India. The word itself comes