Sailboat Reviews

The Alerion Sloop, Bristol Channel Cutter and Morris 40 cover the range from gentleman's daysailer to blue-water passagemaker. Each is of superior design and construction-it's nice to know you can still buy quality, but you'd better have deep pockets.

The Islander 36 was built from 1971 to 1985, making it one of the longest-lived 36-footers ever on the U.S. market. More than 750 of the Alan Gurney-designed racer-cruiser sloops were built, with production spanning almost the entire history of Islander Yachts.

The Islander 36 is a fairly light-displacement boat. The hand-laid hull is an uncored, single skin, with polyester resin and fiberglass furniture components adding rigidity. The hull and plywood-core deck are bolted together at close intervals through an aluminum toerail.

Boat shows present a wonderful opportunity to not only explore boats well beyond your price range, but also to observe how designers answer the many compromises that each boat design requires. Some designs succeed, and some don't-and often the weak spot is a simple failure to understand the customer.

Catalina Yachts chief engineer and designer Gerry Douglas gives a popular talk at boat shows regarding the evolution of yacht design. One of the main points of his discussion is how various measurement systems for offshore racing influence boat design. Our boat reviews often allude to this influence, tracing a particular boat back to the Cruising Club of America era, the International Offshore Rule (IOR), or some other rule. Douglas is one of the few contemporary sailboat designers who has wisely resisted the urge to latch on to the more radical racing design trends and try incorporate them in a cruising boat.

Allied Yachts secured its place in the boatbuilding pantheon with its original Seawind ketch, which was launched in 1962 and was the first fiberglass boat to circumnavigate, and the Luders 33, which was recognized as a classic design of the era preceding the fin-keel racer-cruiser. Unfortunately, while its products were heading for glory on the high seas, the company was headed for the boneyard, thanks to mediocre management, severe under-exposure, and the vagaries of the boat-buying public. But by the time Allied went out of business for the fifth and final time in 1981, they had developed a reputation for fashioning solidly built (if uninspiringly finished) boats, unabashedly oriented toward cruising.

The hull of the Seawind II is a solid lay-up. The deck and cabin trunk are balsa cored. The top of the coachroof, in the way of the deck-stepped mast, is cored with solid, filled epoxy for greater compression strength.

In regard to PSs marine sanitation hose test report (PS April 2012): One of the issues we have run into is winterization. Several hose manufacturers state that their hose is not resistant to glycol-based antifreeze, which is what most winterization fluids use to depress the freezing point. After we ended up with a really bad stink, we read up on the hose manufacturers website and realized that our hose was not compatible with the fluid we had used. (This actually caused me to renew my subscription to Practical Sailor.) It would be good for your next articles Value Guide to include a column on winterization compatibility.

There are VHFs on the market that use Bluetooth to pair with compatible headsets, but we don't know whether they use the same Bluetooth protocol as the Oticon streaming device that you have. A call to Oticon likely would confirm. The only Bluetooth-ready VHFs weve come across are the Standard Horizons fixed-mount Quantum GX5500S (PS Best Choice, October 2009) and its HX760S handheld (PS July 2009), which has been discontinued.

Looking back at the Paceship PY 23, American 26, Yankee Dolphin24, and Aquarius 23-we can examine several other approaches to the same problem. That is for stability, a sailboat must have an underwater appendage such as a keel or centerboard, and ballast. Both are at odds with the concept of an easily trailerable boat that can be launched at most ramps. A deep fixed keel is untenable.