Boat Review: Hunter 40
August 4, 2013
Hunter Marine—now known as Marlow Hunter—celebrated its 40th birthday and a recent change in ownership by introducing its latest mid-size cruising boat, the new Hunter 40,
Hunter Marine—now known as Marlow Hunter—celebrated its 40th birthday and a recent change in ownership by introducing its latest mid-size cruising boat, the new Hunter 40,
The Hanse 415 is superficially like a lot of new production cruising boats in the 40-foot range. It has a plumb bow, generous beam carried well aft, a comfortable cockpit, dual helms and a walk-through transom leading to a drop-down swim step. Like many new cruising boats today, it’s also designed to be fast and easy to handle. But as I found out during a test sail on Narragansett Bay last fall, not all 40-foot “performance cruisers” are created equal.
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It’s good to be a multihull sailor these days. Advances in materials and design have not only revolutionized the market, but it seems the innovations just keep coming. Case in point: the Leopard 48, a boat that employs the latest in catamaran thinking to deliver a platform that is as fun as it is comfortable.
It’s not often that we here at SAIL get to test-sail production sailboats from Japan. Personally, this is the first one I’ve ever sailed, in a test or otherwise. It is a remarkable little vessel.
Although multihull innovation at the racing end of the spectrum gets the lion’s share of the press, no less of a revolution in design has been taking place among cruising multihulls: case in point, French multihull builder Fountaine Pajot’s new Hélia 44, a boat that in its own way is as cutting-edge as a carbon fiber racer.
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The Aussie-bred McConaghy 38 takes skiff sailing adrenalin and repackages it in a low-slung sport boat that redefines the genre. It came as no surprise that our Best Boats team found little not to like about this 7,000lb, all carbon, elegantly Spartan sloop.
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