With the BirdyFish Race resting its dolly on the sands of SkyBeach Resort, we watch as Tampa Bay glasses-off. With our Boat of the Year testing session on weather pause, we head to a beachside thatch hut for a debrief in the shade. Up next is the VX Two, described as a 15-foot ­doublehanded hiking skiff. Without any breeze, we are not rushing to go sailing because this beauty demands whitecaps.

While we wait for the sea breeze to kick in, the VX Two’s new US representative, Ed Furry, soon gives us the low-down. This boat is built by Mackay Boats in New Zealand, which also builds Olympic 470s, 29ers, 49ers and a list of other high-performance class hulls, and as expected, the VX Two is one sharp-looking vessel. The hull itself is identical to Mackay’s VX Evo hull, but the deck is all VX Two, configured for an intermediate doublehanded skiff team.

“It’s a simple boat to sail, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to sail,” Furry says. “It’s easy to sail and race, but it will require a bit more of a technical sailor. For someone coming out of junior sailing, it will be a little sportier—it’s a fast little boat.”    

Simple and slick are the first words that come to mind as Furry tours us through the boat. High-level development and tweaking of the systems by the engineers at Mackay before launching this boat into the world has produced a stunner. It’s as if all the temptations to over-tech and complicate it were ­intentionally avoided. From the transom to the bow and the spliced lines to minimalist hardware, there’s nothing superfluous about it. That’s the sort of obsessiveness to detail that gets them to 209 pounds all-up.

The flip-up rudder has a quick-release skewer, and the daggerboard slots flush into the trunk. To note, the foils are super-high-aspect specimens with razor-sharp edges and pointy tips that will need the tender loving care they deserve.

The mainsheet comes straight off the boom, skiff-style, which really opens up the cockpit and puts the sail load at hand. An experienced forward crew will appreciate floating-jib leads and the smooth-­running halyard purchases at the mast for quick and dynamic mode changes, as well as the curved carbon jib-cleat brackets that don’t have any hard edges. The spinnaker is a single-line launch-and-retrieval ­system for a high-clew kite that’s pulled through a large throat in the foredeck and into a sock on the cockpit floor. The rig is a tapered one-piece carbon extrusion, but future rigs will be two-part, Furry says.

Like the BirdyFish, the VX Two’s simplicity doesn’t require much of a briefing, so 30 minutes later, with diamonds on the bay, Boat of the Year judges Mike Ingham and Erik Shampain kick off their session in a 10-knot afternoon sea breeze. We give full-throttle chase in the RIB as they tear off across Tampa Bay. With the kite lifting the bow and the judges leaning aft, they’re easily pegging double digits on the boat’s Vakaros unit.

“We hit 13.7, and it was really easy to get there,” Shampain says. “And it isn’t hairy at all when you do get there. The kite is a small skiff design with a narrow clew box, like on the 49er and 29er, so it’s really easy to trim and pull around the zippered jib luff through jibes. Two big pulls on the sheet, and it’s through.”

What impresses Ingham the most is the feel on the helm. “It’s almost crazy-responsive both upwind and downwind,” he says. “And the boat is also really responsive to crew-weight movements. It’s a boat where you’re going to be really active and moving a lot, but it also has a decent amount of stability. Yes, it’s a skiff, but it feels much more like a big dinghy.”

“It’s super-efficient” is Shampain’s immediate assessment after sailing. “Everything runs so smoothly; there’s no friction anywhere. The sails are perfect, with a nice-looking main and the battens on the jib. At first, I thought the kite would be too small and flat, but it was really good for planing.”

What stands out most about the VX Two for Shampain, however, is the build quality and detailing. “It’s beautifully finished—elegant with the joins and the rounded corners—and the ergonomics were great. In the tacks, when I was ­forward, I wasn’t stumbling on the kite bag, and it was easy to get straight to the hiking strap.”

For Ingham, the angled contours of the cockpit tanks are comfortable for hiking. “It fits my body well, the straps are in the right place, and there aren’t any pressure points on the back of my legs.”

Both judges agree that the boat delivers next-level skiff-style dinghy sailing, so it will require some getting used to, but it’s the sort of boat you’ll be frothing to rig when the breeze is on. “You will get wet, but this boat will be forgiving at high speeds,” Shampain says.

In the event of a capsize, righting lines run beneath rails, but for our capsize test, Shampain, at only 145 pounds, went straight to the daggerboard and righted the boat himself, scooping me (at 185 pounds dry) in it, holding on to the hiking strap. Easy.The boat, as sailed, was priced at $26,000, which the judges find surprising given the quality of the boat and its performance. It is perhaps the price—the dollar-for-speed—that has Shampain pondering which of the fantastic four (J/7, Storm 18, BirdyFish Race, and VX Two tested in St. Petersburg) is most worthy of a Boat of the Year title. We’ll find out this fall; we have many more boats to consider. For now, it’s in the running, but all four delivered excellence.

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For the second day of our 2025 Boat of the Year winter edition in St. Petersburg, Florida, in February, we wake up to the welcome sounds of breeze through palm fronds, knowing that the first sail of the day is a foiling session. On tap is the curious 15-foot BirdyFish, said to be the best entree-to-foiling craft there is. With a distinct scow hull, J-shaped foils, a rudder with an elevator, and a powerful sail plan, the boat is plenty quick. Bonus points there.

But there are also two compelling attributes for wannabe foilers: It doesn’t tip over when it stops, like every other monohull foiler. That means more time sailing, less time swimming. And second, the thing is beginner-proof, which of course means more time sailing, less time fixing or figuring it out. Moth sailors can relate.

Easy flight is the premise of the BirdyFish, whose French designers and builders dabble in the IMOCA space and have figured out how to make this little scow fly so effortlessly. If you can sail a dinghy, you can ­definitely sail the BirdyFish.

“This boat sails like any other boat,” Hardy Peters, of East Coast Sailboats, says. He’s the boat’s distributor in North Carolina and has been sailing the foils off it since he got his hands on it this past fall. “But once it takes off, you’re following your apparent wind. It’s that simple.”

Hardy’s 20-minute ­presail boat tour is all that the judges require. While the BirdyFish looks complex on its dolly, there actually are not many ropes to pull, and everything is sorted. The J foils slot into casings like leeboards (and can be reversed if need be) and are stored in their upright position, with a lift line leading up to the mast. Once they’re in their slots, the rest of the rigging procedure is cake: Hoist the jib, the gennaker on a furler, and the main up the groove of the carbon rig. Nothing to it.

One important piece of gear, Peters points out, is the bungee keeper that goes from the transom corners to the forward tip of the tiller. “That keeps you honest by keeping the rudder centered,” he says. “The rudder movements with this boat are incremental—I’m talking inches only. The only time you’re pushing the rudder hard is when you’re tacking. The bungee is a safety feature for learning to foil, to dampen the turn and keep you from spinning out. When you get good, you can take it off—if you want.”

One of the biggest challenges for Moth and Waszp sailors is launching, but the BirdyFish comes with no drama. Lower the rudder and foils about a foot, get the boat past the shallow, unfurl the jib to get to deeper water, put the rudder down (at 3 feet of depth), and then push both foils down into their cassettes. Put the keeper bungee over the top, cleat the foil lock-down lines, and you’re off and running. No further adjustments required.

Following this very procedure, Shampain jumps in first with Peters, and they’re promptly off and foiling, hovering only 2 feet above the surface—that’s maximum ride height. There are no mechanical adjustments to foil. It’s all about shifting weight forward, building speed, waiting for liftoff, and then shifting weight aft to let ’er rip.

“I think they nailed it,” Shampain says after he singlehandedly sails the boat in 10 to 12 knots of breeze and flat water. “Without a lot of experience, and having sailed Moths once or twice—barely successfully—I felt pretty successful. It was really intuitive. What was amazing is how much real apparent wind it was making.”

Shampain’s true-wind angle was about 65 to 70 true when foiling, noting that the boat goes upwind just fine with the jib and fairly deep with the gennaker, which would make it a good one-design course-racing boat. When it’s in displacement mode, it delivers the same sensation as a scow. “While it’s not going to be the fastest foiler at the club,” he says, “it will be the most accessible. Adults and youth sailors can experience and learn how to foil in a safe way, where there’s much less risk of crashing and getting hurt. Safe, easy entry to foiling, that’s what this boat is about.”

Ingham, who was rehabbing a shoulder surgery, has his reservations about jumping into the BirdyFish, but after watching Shampain and Peters, he’s keen to give it a go. He’s glad he did.

“The innovation on this boat is like, wow,” Ingham says. “It is an easy foiler, but it’s so responsive to fore-and-aft weight movement, so you can tweak it to get good at it, but at the same time, to get it foiling, you don’t have to be good at it. It’s just kind of automatic.

The boat does, however, have a tendency and ability to turn really fast if you let go over the tiller, he adds. “I felt like I had to hold the rudder really firm and stable, but I also had to drive with a purpose—like if I wanted the boat to go up, I had to make it go up, but when I wanted it to go straight, I had to work really hard to go straight.”

With the class active in Europe, Peters is confident that US class racing is not far behind. He has imported a half-dozen boats, with a vision for a one-design circuit soon. The boat is currently available in a Fun version for $24,000 and a Race version for $25,000, but the next batch, Peters says, will have price increases.

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The first nominee on the list for Sailing World’s Boat of the Year judging team in February is the J/7, which J Boats unveiled in the dead of Rhode Island’s winter in December 2024, ice on deck and all. Here in St. Petersburg, basking in its slip at the SkyBeach Resort, it looks better already. On board to brief us is Chris Tait, a dealer from the Northeast who’s handling the J/7’s Florida roadshow. He’s sold a lot of J Boats over the years, but this one, he tells us, has everyone’s attention. Small is the new big.

“This boat really fills a void in the marketplace for a small keelboat daysailer,” Tait says. “It’s a simple family boat, a first-time boat, a club boat, a program boat. It ticks a lot of boxes.”

It’s amazing how many people the boat’s cockpit swallows and still sails impeccably, he adds, drawing our attention to 8 feet of comfortable seating. There are even seats aft of the ­end-boom mainsheet bridle. The J/7 is indeed spacious, and the ­coamings are angled outboard, which makes them comfortable when sitting inboard or on the rail for a better view. 

“You want to hike so bad, but you don’t have to,” Tait says. “We’re all used to ­hiking on a boat, but this is just as comfortable sitting back, chilling out, and enjoying the sail.”
US yacht clubs are increasingly turning to club-owned fleets to attract and retain members; the J/7, Tait says, encompasses all of what they are asking for: a simple and durable boat with low offseason maintenance. Belowdecks on the J/7 is glossy white gelcoat, a 6-foot V-berth, and 5-foot settees. There’s no battery, electronics or facilities. There’s not a single piece of wood on the boat or a ­redundant piece of hardware.

For the jib, 2-to-1 sheets lead to Harken SnubAir winches. The mainsheet cascades to a swivel cleat on a post, and the Dyneema backstay splits and snap-shackles to the cockpit walls. The rig is a deck-stepped (hinged) aluminum spar on a compression post. There’s a ring on the mast for symmetric sailing and an optional bolt-on prod for an asymmetric spinnaker. There are no downwind sails for our demo, but the judges sure wish they were.

Keeping it simple also keeps the price down for club-flee­­­t purchases, and to that end, we’re told that the China-built and US-assembled base-boat price is just shy of $55,000, excluding sails. The full sail-away package brings it to $70,000 with a trailer (there’s a single lift point for hoists, and the boat weighs 2,300 pounds).

Shallow draft was high on the priority list for designer Al Johnstone, and the result is a 3.8-foot trapezoidal-shaped bulb keel, ideal for skinny coastal waters and inland freshwater playgrounds. We’re happy to have it when sailing through Tampa Bay’s shifty shoals.

With the boat brief complete, the judges exit the marina under mainsail and into a 10-knot northerly that lays the water board flat.

BOTY judges Erik Shampain and Mike Ingham promptly have it gliding upwind, wishing they had another J/7 to line up against. It’s in their nature to tweak, so they fidget with leads and controls and their weight placement, and soon settle in and relax. There’s not much they can do but sit back and enjoy the sail. That is the point.

Before turning downwind, Ingham spins the boat through a mock 720 penalty turn, and the boat circles its length. The boat’s straight and deep ­rudder blade glides it through the turns, even without any kinetic assist, confirming that it would be a responsive boat for ­club-level team- and match-racing skirmishes.

Once they turn downwind, Shampain instinctively moves forward and crouches at the shrouds to wing the jib, wishing instead he had a spinnaker sheet in hand. Still, the boat tracks nicely dead-downwind with a slight weather heel, responding to subtle weight movements.

“I really like the idea of a short sprit and a furling ­spinnaker,” Shampain says with a grin after a few minutes of fighting the jib clew. “Or a jib boom. But, ­definitely, a spinnaker is a must.”

Ingham, who has spent more time on the helm, notes after sailing that the boat “has really nice stability and steers really well, even from a dead-stop. There’s always flow on the rudder, so I can see how this would be a really fun club racing boat. It’s pretty darn simple.”

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The Storm 18, which its creators categorized as a daysailer when entering this new US-built small craft into Sailing World’s 2026 Boat of the Year competition, is so much more. The design brief is for a versatile craft for clubs and hyperactive ­sailing centers that need a boat for teaching first, racing second, and for the adults and the youth squads expanding into team and match racing.

The backstory on the Storm 18 is a long one, but it takes root in the Northeast, where a number of Long Island Sound-based yacht clubs have been pushing their vintage Ideal 18s well past expiration dates. Storm Marine, a new company formed to bring this boat to market, identified a demand for a lower-­cost US-built boat for clubs and community sailing programs. A collective of industry veterans conceptualized the boat, produced a prototype, and for the better part of a year, put it into the hands of opinionated sailors and program directors. What was presented to the judges in St. Petersburg in February was close to final, but there was more tweaking to come. By early spring, they said, they would be into production with the real deal.

The 1,300-pounder is expected to “deliver an exceptional sailing experience,” Storm Marine’s Bill Crane says, “a stable and safe platform that is versatile enough to be used by learn-to-sail participants, junior sailors, family racing, interclub racing (fleet racing, team racing, and match racing) and ­institutional staff.”

That’s a lot of boxes to check, but after a few hours of sailing, both BOTY judges, Mike Ingham and Erik Shampain agree that they’ve somehow managed to tick them all.

“They found their niche,” Ingham says. “It’s not flashy, but they got it right for what they want to do with it, which is a lot.”

As the boat skews heavily to institutional usage, it is essentially overbuilt, Crane says. “Whereas a lot of boats have stringers and bulkheads, this boat has two main pieces. With just two transverse frames, the vacuum-bagged hull and deck are flat-bonded along the rail, which is protected with a rub rail.”

One interesting approach used by the builder, Fulcrum Speedworks, is gluing all fittings to the laminate. No holes required: Every piece of hardware is mounted to glued G-Tech plates with stainless-steel threaded inserts. This approach has also allowed them to experiment with hardware locations and refine the boat’s ergonomics during its development, and there is a lot of hardware to handle the asymmetric- and symmetric-­spinnaker setups. For the asymmetric, there’s a retractable pole in a foredeck trough, and the spinnaker pole is loosely stowed inside stainless-­steel brackets on the boom.

The aluminum boom is a ­substantial rectangular section and quite a head-knocker (I can attest). According to Crane, the prototype’s boom had already been raised 40 mm from its original location, and will be raised another 120 mm. The boom will also be lengthened 100 mm to offset the change. Another change to the final version includes ditching the heavy and expensive aluminum rudder head. They will instead slot the tiller directly into the top of the rudder. What was, for our test, a kick-up rudder will be fixed.

Sailing it doublehanded in 10 knots and flat water, Ingham’s assessment is that “it’s a ­pleasure to drive. It’s very ­sensitive to body weight and sail trim.”

Shampain agrees, adding: “It does have a nice balance and a sportboat sort of feeling, but there’s some weight to it that gets it through the chop. It’s really responsive to crew weight and heel, but it did feel like a heavier boat at times when it got really light.”

Crane is OK with the boat being overbuilt. He likes the ­slogan: “It’s a fast slow boat.”

Inexperienced sailors should feel safe, he says, and experienced sailors will have fun with it. It is, indeed, stable at the dock and under sail, the judges note. They tried to force a capsize, but the fin keel and 245 kilograms of ballast weren’t having it.

Having been left with a ­positive ­lasting impression, both Ingham and Shampain return to shore pleased with the responsiveness of the spade rudder and the overall comfort of the boat. Four adults max would be about right, but it would be an easy singlehander too.

“It was a real pleasure to drive,” Shampain says. “And all the right systems and sail controls are there in the right place to teach everything—vang, outhaul, cunningham and traveler. I like that they didn’t oversimplify the boat; it’s just techie enough, but with all the seating and the soft deck [SeaDek panels], it would be a great little boat for harbor sailing.”

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