Boat Review: Dufour 405
May 19, 2010
French builder Dufour Yachts added this sparkling new 40-footer to its range of Umberto-Felci-designed performance cruisers late last year.
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
It’s a rare and wonderful thing to have three different American companies all working on new boats in the 30-foot range at the same time, let alone in such straitened times as these. And, as if to illustrate the rich diversity of boat design and construction, each of these boats is aimed at a different subset of the general sailing population.Truth to tell, one of these builders isn’t
Check out the nominees for the 2010 awards!Never mind the economy — it’s business as usual in the boating game. Well, not quite. Everyone in the marine trade is feeling the financial pinch these days, so it’s even more impressive that so many new boats have been developed and readied in time for the fall boat show season. What this year’s line-up of new models—everything from dinghies to
When he competed in the first Golden Globe Race in 1968-69, French sailor Bernard Moitessier achieved legend status not for winning, but rather for precisely
The Cruising Club of America (CCA) is a collection of 1,400 ocean sailors with extensive offshore seamanship, command experience, and a shared passion for making
With the new HH44-SC, HH Catamarans is pursuing dual purposes: producing a luxury, high-performance cat for cruising families and couples, and answering what HH CEO
“What? Are you kidding me? That never happens!” Such was the response from a sailing buddy when I told him I was joining the Rio
If the prospect of 1,500 miles of ocean sailing weren’t enough to put nerves on edge, crews aboard 115 boats queued up for the Salty
The National Sailing Hall of Fame (NSHOF) has announced this year’s class of inductees, people who have contributed to the world of sailing through education,
So much goes into preparing for a big regatta: finding reliable crew, boat repairs and maintenance, practice, time, money. But often it’s the simplest things
You can take the sailor out of racing, but you can’t take racing out of the sailor. So, when Nicolas Berenger, product and commercial director
I was launching a one-person plywood dinghy named Loner that a friend and I had just built, when the original boat girl walked by on
