BEST EVER BLUEWATER YACHTS

Which yacht should you choose for bluewater sailing? This question generates even more debate among sailors than questions about what’s the coolest yacht, or the best for racing. Whereas racing designs are measured against each other, cruising sailors get very limited opportunities to experience different yachts in real oceangoing conditions.

Here, we bring you our top choices from decades of designs and launches. Over the years, the Yachting World team has sailed these boats, tested them or judged them for European Yacht of the Year awards, and we have sifted through the many to curate a selection that we believe should be on your wishlist.

Making the right choice may come down to how you foresee your yacht being used after it has crossed an ocean or completed a passage: will you be living at anchor or cruising along the coast? If so, your guiding requirements will be space, cabin size, ease of launching a tender and anchoring closer to shore, and whether it can comfortably accommodate non-expert-sailor guests. All of these considerations have generated the inexorable rise of the bluewater catamaran – monohulls can’t easily compete on these points.

But if your itinerary and agenda calls for more time at sea and varying conditions, or you plan to go to places that could be more challenging, a monohull has it. A Lagoon is going to be quite wrong in Jan Mayen or the Beagle Channel…

As so much of making the right choice is selecting the right boat for the venture in mind, we have separated out our edit into categories: best for comfort; for families; for performance; and for expedition or high latitudes sailing.

For another perspective, Jeremy Wyatt of World Cruising, organisers of the ARC and World ARC, gives us his thoughts from over 20 years of seeing yachts (and crews) of all shapes, sizes and characteristics – see page 37.

BEST FOR COMFORT

AMEL 55

This is the successor to the legendary Super Maramu, a ketch design that for several decades