A Champion is Crowned
Your voting determined the best mini-cruiser sailboat
And there you have it folks! Congratulations to Com-Pac Yachts and to Sun Cat fans and sailors everywhere—your Sun Cat has sailed its way past the competition in our first-ever Mini-Cruiser Madness contest. The Sun Cat bested the popular Montgomery 17 by gaining 58% of the vote.
Is the Com-Pac Sun Cat truly the “best trailerable camp-cruising sailboat ever”? As we all know, no boat is perfect for everyone or for every cruising ground—and of course so much depends on your own wants and needs. But in terms of seeming to meet the most common or important needs of our readers, the Sun Cat has come out on top, beating some very good boats along the way.
For those of you wanting to learn more about the Sun Cat, look for us to publish our original full-length review tomorrow—stay tuned.
A few of you have asked how you can refer back to this Mini-Cruiser Madness contest and the results. We’ve just compiled all of them in one place. Click here to go to our Substack homepage. Notice the various columns and categories along the top? Click on Mini-Cruiser Madness to see all of the results in one place.
Will we run this contest again next year? Sure! The best idea we’ve heard so far is to take the top 16 (of 32) finishers from this year and mix them in with 16 new designs for the 2024 Mini-Cruiser Madness. Will the Sun Cat simply prevail again, or will a new design we missed last time rise to the top? Will small-boat trends or sensibilities change enough that one of this year’s runners-up wins next time? Time will tell.
We’ve asked once already, but if you haven’t done so, feel free to leave a comment with suggestions of boats you’d like to see in the next competition.
Finally, we’ve also had numerous suggestions for smaller, more focused versions of this same contest “Open boats” “Sail and Oar Boats” “Maxi-Trailerables” “Daysailers,” etc. We might play with some shorter polls or head-to-head contests. Another suggestion we like is a shorter poll or prompt asking for the “perfect boat” for a particular location or purpose (Texas 200, Circumnavigating Vancouver Island, Salish 100, Small Neighborhood Lake Boat, Mississippi River Cruise, etc.) This could be as simple as asking readers for suggestions then pitting the boats against each other in brackets. Let us know if you have particular cruise or boat-choice dilemma that might make a good contest.
Thanks to everyone for your participation. Most of us were at least a little skeptical of the change to this Substack format, but we’re all really enjoying the interactive nature and connection with the small-boat community. And we’ve got some fun articles coming down the ways! —Eds
For next year, I very much like the idea of the "focused" concept. It's more useful for me (and less frustrating), to compare a cabin boat to a similar sized cabin boat, than comparing a decent sized cabin boat to an open boat.
Along with your idea for "open boats", "Sail and oar", "Maxi-trailerables", and "daysailors", I would love to see a contest for kit boats instead of production boats. How would the CLC Pocketship or Guider fare against the Welsford Navigator or the even Vivier's Jewel or ilur?