Precision 165

The designer calls it a “crossover,” but the P-165 has true cruising potential.

How one defines the Precision 165 probably hinges on your definition of the word “cruise.” Designer Jim Taylor calls his popular Precision 18 “the smallest boat that could be practically cruised, and still be easily trailered by a relatively small car.” He describes her smaller sister, the P-165, as a “crossover—a daysailer with the ‘get out of the weather’ cuddy cabin and on-board toilet facilities of a small cruiser.” SCA readers, many of whom regularly cruise boats a foot or more shorter, would likely see the P-165 as a full-fledged cruiser for their purposes.

In the 1990s, the principals at Precision Boatworks commissioned Taylor to design a series of trailerables with cabins, the smallest of which would be the P-165. The P-18, P-21 and P-23 would comprise the rest of the fleet. Making a boat trailerable inevitably introduces a number of limitations in design, such as weight, draft and beam restrictions, followed by an effort to balance often mutually exclusive characteristics; like good performance with shallow draft, comfortable accommodations on a minimal waterline, and adequate stability at a light displacement—no easy task.

Like a good writer removing superfluous verbiage with every edit, Taylor used a red pencil during the design process until he’d drawn what is perhaps the smallest true keel-boat trailersailer in production: the 750 pound P-165. “She is offered with a fixed lead keel only,” Taylor said, “and performs very nicely with just a 21 inch deep draft.”