Over the last decade, South African company Robertson and Caine has become one of the worlds leading multihull builders, thanks in no small part to its association with charter companies The Moorings and Sunsail. For many years it has produced boats under two namesits own Leopard brand name, and that of the Moorings. The latest cat to emerge from this busy company is the Leopard 38, aka the
Late last fall, I looked over a partly completed hull sitting in a small workshop at a boatyard in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Even minus keel, paint, trim and other essentials, it was apparent that this would be a fast and attractive boat. Less than four weeks later, with snow carpeting the small islands off Marblehead, the boat was being sea-trialed; and yes, it was indeed fast and
French builder Dufour Yachts added this sparkling new 40-footer to its range of Umberto-Felci-designed performance cruisers late last year.
Most production boats are conceived with a design brief from a builder who has a targeted market in mind. Not so the Landing School 30 (LS-30). Its built by students at a non-profit boatbuilding and design college. The Landing School and its resident designer, Steve Dalzell, design and build boats as part of the curriculum: selling them is an afterthought. As a result, only two or three LS30s
Fountaine Pajot has been building catamarans for more than 30 years. Over that time, the company’s boats have changed in evolutionary steps rather than quantum leaps, with hundreds of them being field-tested every day in charter fleets around the world. The new Lipari 41 is a further refinement of the simple, strong, spacious craft this builder has always produced.
Passport Yachts has been building semi-custom voyaging sailboats for three decades. For the last 20 years these boats have been produced in a modern facility in China. Thom Wagner has been the force behind the company from the beginning, and he still is the man to see when you are ready to buy one. His latest project is the Passport Vista 615 Twin Cockpit, designed by Bill Dixon.
As we strolled across the grounds at the New York Yacht Clubs Harbour Court facility in Newport, Rhode Island, Al Johnstone described the design brief for his new J/97 racer/cruiser. I thought we needed an entry-level sprit boat thats a little more user-friendly, non-intimidating and family-cruiseable than the J/105, he said.CONSTRUCTIONStructurally, the boat is
Using a bow thruster to get a 36-foot boat off the dock was new to me, but fair to say, the folks at Island Packet know what they’re doing. Without the thruster we would have required a heap of pulpit shoving and gear shifting to escape that narrow corner of the marina, so our easy exit to San Francisco Bay provided the perfect introduction to the Estero, the latest offering from a company where
For over 30 years Bavaria Yachts has been producing good sailing designs at a very affordable price, helped in part by automated production facilities and unit volumes that have exceeded 3,000 a year. The latest model from the Bavaria design crew is this 45-footer with a three-cabin layout that includes an owners cabin forward and two cabins aft of the saloon. The owners cabin
You said this is not a raceboat, I grinned, as the new Sensei 9M sliced across the mouth of the Bosphorus with Istanbuls Blue Mosque dead ahead. The wind was only 8 to 10 knots and the silver hull was knifing through the light chop at nearly 6. I had trouble believing I was able to take a boat right from the factory, only minutes after it was first rigged and launched, and
A record-warm Atlantic Ocean, possibly competing with the usually mitigating effects of El Niño, has caused scientists at NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center to amend their
Even before they joined forces with Beneteau back in 2018, Seascape’s Slovenian principals, Andraž Mihelin and Kristian Hajnšek, were brainstorming with their go-to French designer,
Aug. 10/2023: My summer sailing schedule has been chopped up by intermittent book appearances, and it certainly didn’t help that the first several weeks were
Simon Fisher, who has twice stood on the winner’s podium for the world’s premiere professional crewed round-the-world race, has earned the Magnus Olsson Prize, awarded
Jeanneau brings a catamaran design brief to the monohull market with the new Jeanneau Yachts 55. The cockpit layout is unconventional, with twin helms moved
Back in the 1960s, the ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson was watching a tragedy unfold in and near Great Island saltmarsh, where the Connecticut River enters
It has been more than three weeks since Jacqueline Lawson last heard from her husband, Donald Lawson, aboard the ORMA 60 trimaran Defiant, which he
Are you happy with your boat? Few of us are, at least not 100%. There’s always something that could be improved or altered. There are
It’s really not fair. That’s what I was thinking perched on the weather rail of the Italia Yachts 14.98 Artemis while beating up Eastern Bay
I must admit, I cracked. The last voice shouting mansplanations at me about how to work the bow thruster that we didn’t have was the
