Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Sailboats of North America

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Hundreds of sailboat reviews with line drawings, profiles, and boat specs. One of my favorite "most read" books. Binding is shoddy, however. Many internal pages in my copy are falling out of the book. A result of heavy use?

Most sailors are a lot more opinionated than the author of this short book. It consists of sail plans, layouts and text descriptions of a large cross-section of modern boats. It has some puzzling omissions - the Westsail 32, for instance, didn't make it - and it only describes one or two examples of each make of boat.

It was worth buying, mainly because looking at boats doesn't give you much of an idea of hull type and interior layouts, and that's important to weed out boats that clearly wouldn't fit your needs. In that respect, it does an excellent job.

But I would have really liked to see some more subjective opinions; the presentation is pretty clinical and impersonal.

The author lives in New Hampshire, which shows in the coverage of boat models: obscure (to the point of apparent one-off) small New England boats are fanatically represented, but larger production models are hit/miss. Many build-from-plans models are present, but the Catalina 27, with more than 6600 hulls built, is absent, but something called a Marsh Hen with a whopping 40 built is present.

The front matter and glossary are decent, with a number of diagrams showing bow shapes, etc. The boat descriptions are split into One Design / Small and Cruiser / Auxiliaries sections, a division that's awkward and sometimes arbitrary.

The terms used to describe boat features aren't always consistent among models, which somewhat confounds comparisons.

For the 44 cents plus shipping I paid I guess I got good value.

My interest in and curiosity about a number of smaller sailboats was more than adequately satisfied by this wonderful little volume. The delivery was fast, the price reasonable. I am more than happy with the transaction