Advertisement

The SAIL Top 10 Best Boats

SAIL’s Best Boats 2014: Xp 44

Step aboard the Xp 44 and the first thing you might find yourself wondering is: what’s not to love? This mid-40-foot racer-cruiser is designed to deliver decades of racing and cruising pleasure while offering a wealth of the kind of design features sailors have long since come to expect from this high-end Danish builder.

SAIL’s Best Boats 2014: Gunboat

Gunboat catamarans are known for their sleek lines and speed. Owners take pride in sailing their boats, and the engines are used primarily for maneuvering and intermittent auxiliary propulsion-; they are rarely used for extended motoring.

SAIL’s Best Boats 2014: RS Cat 16

Talk about timing! No sooner does Oracle Team USA stage a comeback for the ages than the veteran UK sportboat and dinghy builder RS unveils a performance beach cat with wave-piercing bows just like those on an AC72!

SAIL’s Best Boats 2014: Paine 14

After 40 years of sailing his beloved Herreshoff 12 1/2 Petunia, designer Chuck Paine figured he knew what he had to do to improve what many aficionados call “the perfect boat.” His new Paine 14, now being built by French & Webb in Belfast, Maine, is 10 percent smaller than the old 12 1/2 and 40 percent lighter, with modern appendages and much of its underbody cut away.

mxNext

Ever since Russian naval architect Vlad Murnikov burst onto the scene with his Whitbread racer Fazisi back in 1989—a time when Russia was still the Soviet Union—his designs have defied the norm.

Blue Jacket 40: a Fin-keeled, Twin-wheeled Performance Cruiser

We sail the Blue Jacket 40, a fin-keeled, twin-wheeled performance cruiser from Island Packet Yachts If you were asked to sum up any boat you sailed in just two words, it’s a fair bet that some of them wouldn’t be “family-friendly.” Thankfully, the phrase that stuck in my mind after our test sail of the new Blue Jacket 40 was this: sailor-friendly. Given the boat’s unusual but impeccable design pedigree, it could hardly have been anything else.

SAIL’s Best Boats 2017: J/112e

Best Performance Boat over 30ft The third in J/Boats’s “E” series, in which the “E” stands for elegance and evolution, you’d think the J/112e would

SAIL 2013 Best Boats Nominees

A strong lineup of new boats from domestic and foreign builders will be on display at the Newport International Boat show in September and the U.S. Sailboat Show in Annapolis in October. SAIL’s judging team will be inspecting them closely for the 2013 Best Boats awards.

Best Boats 2013: J/70

There’s nothing more disappointing than test sailing a high-octane sport boat in a drifter. But that wasn’t a problem with the new 22ft, 9in J/70. For our sail trial we had a steady 20-knot southerly, gusting over 25 knots and kicking up a sharp chop off Bristol, Rhode Island.

Draft Dodger

Britain’s boatbuilding industry is a shadow of what it was back in the 1970s and 80s, but a handful of boutique yards still thrives around its shores. One such is Northshore Yachts, whose Southerly range has survived four decades of the boom-and-bust cycles that saw once-mighty production brands tumble.

Boat under shrinkwrap

Selecting a Marine Pro

Note: This story is excerpted from SAIL Contributing Editor Christopher Birch’s upcoming book The Four Seasons of Boat Maintenance—a compendium of lessons learned during his

Squalls at night are no joke, but good preparation will get you through safely. Photo courtesy of Andy Schell

Storms & Sea Stories

The wind built faster than it was forecasted to. We ate dinner with full sail, close-reaching on a building SSW’ly breeze. Before dark we had

Photo: Lisa Smith Molinari

A Charter Passage Rewritten

Sailing on a schedule is famously a recipe for disaster, but on charter you don’t have much of a choice. The adventure is what you make of it. 

Advertisement
Advertisement