Astus Boats out of France has a niche market. It has been very successful building a series of small, collapsible, very lightweight trimarans. These are the kinds of boats you could easily tow behind a small car like my Subaru. 

Kevin Dibley, the designer of the new Kraken 50, is an old mate of mine and always provides me with enough “meat” to the design to allow me to do an accurate review. For that I  am grateful. This new luxury cruising boat is built in China by Hansheng Yachts and is designed to combine comfort and performance. We hear that all the time but in this case, with Kevin as the designer, I think we can actually believe it.

As we age, we’re able to look back and see the little twists of fate that had massive reverberations in our lives. Mary Orme Ellis knows this better than most. When she was a 19-year-old college student in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she started dating a young man with a sailboat, and her life was forever changed.

We live in a 9-to-5 world, our calendars, computers and appointment books jammed with scribbled must-dos and don’t-forgets, and we have very little time that isn’t scheduled. The very concept of “spare time” has disappeared from our vocabularies. Kids scurry from soccer practice to dance lessons without pause for either kid or parent.

A popular one-design dinghy class association recently announced that its rules committee had approved new class-legal digital compasses. I was curious to learn more about the breakthrough, wondering if the committee had finally given in to data. Cruisers and handicap racers find that data can simplify sailing: inexpensive computers tie routing to actual weather, a start can be precisely timed with clocks that account for speed and distance, and tactics can be determined based on actual fleet and global positioning. Instead, I learned that the committee had barely budged: Finally allowing its sailors to pick from two 20-year-old digital compass designs, in addition to the analog kind, but only “provided that the devices do not have the capacity for information other than heading.” 

It began with a dream of sailing bluewater. In 2008, Philip Kersten, owner of the 1978 Alden 44 sloop Tioga, assembled a rookie crew to sail from Nahant, Massachusetts, just north of Boston, to Bermud

We lost a subscriber last summer. That’s not unusual. It’s part of the ebb and flow of the magazine business, gain some readers, lose some. Yet this loss was remarkable because of the stature of the subscriber. Let me tell you about Rudy Haase.

Get your boat in gear for the sailing season by tackling your to-do list now.

Engine maintenance is rarely at the top of anyone’s list of favorite fitting out chores, but skipping it is hardly a wise option. With luck, major jobs were done before the boat was laid up, so the list of spring jobs is short enough that most DIYers should be able to get through them relatively quickly. And then you can sit back and enjoy the sailing season, knowing that you’ve done what you can to avoid engine problems. 

Most sailors aspire to own a brand-new boat, but the rising cost of boat ownership can make that dream seem out of reach. The good news is that the charter business has also ballooned in the last deca

This very nice looking sloop was designed by Berret-Racoupeau and is built by Wauquiez. Here we see the design pendulum swing hard to the comfort side of the scale. I would call this a raised saloon configuration with an aft cockpit. If you are tired of dark and gloomy interiors, this is the boat for you.

This new Grand Soleil model is an attempt to produce a boat with the same impact that the previous Finot-designed GS34 had. More than 300 of the early 34s were built. But to replicate that success takes more than good design and build. It takes good timing and an element of good fortune. The new 34 is designed by a team with Skyron doing the naval architecture and the builder Cantiere del Pardo collaborating with Skyron on the interior and styling. Where the X49 put the emphasis on comfort in the racer-cruiser blend, the GS34 puts the emphasis on performance while not ignoring comfort. This is my first review of a Skyron design.

The X-Yachts have long been one of my favorite European production boatbuilders. Given the trends of today, i.e. modern Euro-type styling, comfort and convenience mixed with some performance, I see X-Yachts as always one step ahead of its competition. The design work is in-house and led by Nils Jepsesen. The new X49 is a 49-foot 6-inch performance cruiser. I like that term and I reflect on how much that category has changed since the Valiant 40 introduced it in 1974. In 1974 it was considered by many to be a radical approach to cruising. The words “cruising” and “performance” were seldom used to describe the same boat. But the world of yachting learned that those were not mutually exclusive at all. Today you can have maximum comfort with maximum performance and it’s considered “normal.”

As the worst hurricane season in decades ravaged the Caribbean, Texas and Florida,  marine businesses immediately sprung to action to assess the damage and get back on their feet in hopes of still being able to capitalize on the lucrative high season just months away. 

Some upgrades and repairs on a sailboat are no-brainers. It’s not difficult know when you need new sails or the paint job and brightwork need attention. But figuring out if a battery upgrade is necessary and how to do it is at times less obvious. Odds are, though, that if the house batteries are more than five years old, you are going to want to think about replacing them. Wet-cell lead acid batteries have a life span of about five years. Some can be coaxed to perform longer, but their performance will degrade over time. If you’ve found that you are constantly charging the batteries or can’t run many of the systems you’d like to for long periods, it may be worth considering a battery upgrade as well. 

I’d like to install some USB ports to charge phones and tablets on my boat. I have a J/35 built in 1986, so the entire interior has exactly one 12-volt receptacle built into the electrical panel next to the starboard quarterberth. I’m OK with that, but my kids seem to run their iPods all the time, so I need a way to charge them without fighting over the single receptacle. My thought was to install two USB ports, one going forward to the V-berth and one over to the port quarter berth. How do I connect them to the electrical system?

As a card-carrying member of the Mainstream Media (Ink-Stained Wretch Newspaper Division), I cringe whenever my brethren in national news organizations report on sailing. They never get it quite righ

It was 40 degrees in the Pearson 36 Onne van der Wal had propped up on jackstands next to his house some nights. Although the boat, which was undergoing a mostly DIY refit, was heated, snow would pile up on its cover, making any project a bone-chilling affair.