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Seven of the 29 boats we sailed are series-built sloops of traditional cruising design marked by moderate displacement-to-length and sail-area-to-displacement ratios, as well as simple rigs and sailplans. In the category of production boats priced between $200,000 and $350,000, we saw four, all built in Europe, that range in length from 38 to 52 feet.

The Moody 38 is an elegant center-cockpit sloop built by Princess Yachts International, formerly Marine Projects Ltd., on England’s Channel coast. The French-built Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 43 is an aft-cockpit sloop that features an ingenious cabin layout that can be converted in minutes from a spacious two-cabin layout to one with four smaller cabins. The Moorings 525, built by Dufour Yachts in France, is a five-cabin aft-cockpit sloop that’s optimized to Moorings specs for the charter trade

The winner of this category is the 38-foot Vilm 116, a center-cockpit sloop with the steering station located under a doghouse, which covers the forward half of the cockpit. One judge said, "She had the nicest interior: You had the sense of a really brilliant use of space and design and volume." Another judge said, "for a coastal cruiser—on the ICW or in Maine or Seattle—I could see a couple having the time of their lives." She’s built by Bootsbau Rügen in Germany and imported by International Yachting Center in Columbia, North Carolina.

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