The SAIL Top 10 Best Boats

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

Two days after the close of the Newport Boat Show, we had a chance to take out a couple of the smaller new boats we’d visited there, the Scandinvian Cruiser and Class 2M. Despite their diminutive size, both were standouts at the show, with their striking good looks, unique design and excellent build quality.Quick but forgivingThe first boat