Every year, boatbuilders of all types submit their new models to be nominees in the SAIL Top 10 Best Boats contest. We start reviewing these as soon as they are available, sometimes traveling throughout the country or even overseas to examine the boats, talk to designers, builders, and dealers, and most important, to take these boats out sailing.
When it’s possible, we like to spend at least a day onboard—more if that’s feasible—to sail the boats as we believe potential owners would want to sail them. This year, one of our reviewers helped deliver a boat from Annapolis to Connecticut; another spent all day racing and then well into the night sailing on a racer-cruiser model. The more hours we can get onboard the better, because it gives us a truer sense of how a boat is meant to be sailed than a short trial could.
Along with sailing and handling characteristics, we look at systems innovation and installation, design, ingenuity, construction quality, deck and interior layouts, and ergonomics. We know that every potential owner has a unique wish list, so we try to include as many boats as possible, from 60-foot multihulls to trailerable daysailers.
We ask a lot of questions, but the most important of these are: Who is this boat’s target audience or owners, and how well does it fulfill its intended purpose and meet needs of those owners? The answers to those basic questions, we think, underpin the best metric for helping determine whether a boat rises to the top.
This year’s Top 10 Best Boats represent a wide range of sailing styles and desires, from traditional heavy displacement bluewater monohulls to high-performance, carbon-ated cruising multihulls, from tweaky, techy racer/cruisers to designs that are deliberately calibrated for simpler sailing. In many, light air performance was notable and also highlighted by builders, which we see as a positive trend that encourages sailors to spend more of their time on the water under sail rather than reaching for the iron genny. These boats also represent the industry’s continuing efforts to innovate and deliver something new and forward-reaching, whether that’s a design that successfully rethinks traditional spaces and accommodations, or a propulsion system that harnesses the newest tech to strive toward fossil-free sailing.
