When is a big boat a small boat? When it travels forward in time 30 years or so. In 1990 a Sigma 33 was seen as a good sized family cruiser-racer. Good for a weekend round the buoys or a week's cruising with the boys. No more. It’s officially part of a breed of boat on the edge of extinction. Yet despair not – the Arcona 345 is a cruiser-racer and also something of an oddity, being one of the few available in this size bracket. This is a real shame because, frankly, having a spent a day blasting around in 25kts of wind and then dining in its well appointed saloon, I’m wondering what more you need from a yacht than this. I doubt you’d get much more speed even if you added a lot of waterline length and, while you might get a whole lot more volume in a 60 footer, how much of that space is useful? Well, I don’t know. Horses for courses and all that.
Anyway, the 345 is an endangered species and we should celebrate it all the more for that. A bit of history on the boat. It was initially
