Boat Reviews

Click here to read a PDF version of this reviewMany of us would like to see the world from the deck of our own sailboats, but time, money, and long, slow offshore passages can interfere with that dream. Sailboats are efficient but slow, earning money requires time and roots, and crossing an ocean takes determination

Sitting at a table with designers and engineers in Miami, I have the sense of a futuristic adventure, akin to NASA in the ’60s or Silicon Valley in the ’80s. Their enthusiasm as they wax on about voltage levels, firmware, energy conversion, and interoperability is contagious. The unlikely source of all this is a catamaran, the Moorings 4300 Electric. In a Caribbean charter fleet

With its flat, plane-friendly Groupe Finot hull shape, dual rudders, square-headed full-batten main, and lifting, narrow-chord bulb keel, the Open 5.7 is obviously designed for the high-end of the performance spectrum. It’s only 20 feet long, displaces merely 1,020 pounds (330 pounds are in the keel), and boasts a working sail area of 280 square feet. Off the wind the 5.7 carries a

(Click here for PDF version)This is not another sportboat designed to do nothing but scream downwind. The Rocket 22 is an update of the Gary Mull–designed Pocket Rocket that has commanded a loyal following in the Pacific Northwest since the 1980s. Don Martin’s design brief was to use cutting-edge materials and insight to turn

I’ve had a penchant for sailing on two hulls ever since I built a 26-foot racing micro-multihull some years ago. That boat routinely sailed at double-digit speeds but was frequently wet, so it was with some enthusiasm that I stepped aboard the considerably larger Broadblue 435 for a test sail on Chesapeake Bay. On deckThe 435 has plenty of deck space for walking

It could be said that Garry Hoyt’s Alerion Express 28 was ahead of the “big daysailer” trend when it was launched in the early 1990s. I took his latest entry in this growing genre—the Alerion Express 38—for a test sail in light air off Newport, Rhode Island.Under SailThe boat is designed to excel in light air, and my test sail proved it was up to the task.

Just when a seasoned boat reviewer thinks he’s seen all the possible variations among midsize cruising monohulls, along comes a vessel to jar him out of that notion. The Delphia 37 did that for me. The designer is unknown in America, the factory is in Poland, and the boat is a delight to sail. On DeckThe deck and cockpit will work nicely for daysailing,

On the West Coast the heyday of the 70-foot sleds is remembered fondly, with good reason. Thanks to their light weight, those old sleds were not hard to manage, they were medium-tech so cost per foot wasn’t sky high, and you could race one with nothing more than a bunch of good sailors; forget the posse of full-time gunslingers. But the sled craze peaked in the early 1990s and later the West

Tom and Cuyler Morris appear to have two runaway bestsellers in their M 36 and 42 daysailer/weekender designs. So why are they building another cruising boat that has much of the styling that got them started in the boat-building business years ago? “It just seemed like the right thing to do,” says Tom Morris. Morris observes that while Europeans are surrounded by historic structures, they like