Best Sailor:

Oh sure, you want us to get all predictable on yo ass, right? Wrong. This year the award belongs to Alex Whitworth and Peter Crozier, crew of Yacht Berrimilla, who in 12 months participated in the Sydney-Hobart race twice, the Fastnet and delivered on their own bottom and doublehanded in between and around the southern capes.  These guys bring the spirit back.

Honorable Mention:

Tito Gonzales for showing that talent is all that matters.  He stepped out briefly from dominating the Lightning class and won the Etchells Worlds in San Francisco by schooling many rockstar residents of that fleet. We like that.

Neville Crighton made great headlines with his childish comments after losing the Hobart race to a boat of the same size and same level of technology, albeit a few months younger.  But mere pouting and puffery don’t quite get you to the top of this category.  What does get you there is the complete idiocy in the choice of reportedly picking smaller spinnakers to get a more favorable rating and then whining that the other boat was faster off the wind in a sprint to the finish after Crighton’s boat failed to keep contact and got shot out.  This made our choice elemental.

Dishonorable Mention:

Chris Law didn't have a sparkling year. Booted off the AC guest helm list (Shosholoza), and an ugly scene with Gavin Brady at Annapolis, give him a nice warm and fuzzy spot right here at SA. Welcome, Chris.

Best Multihull Achievement:

Seacart 30 trimaran.  Combine a major multihull and production boat designer like Marc Lombard, decades of composite building experience and supreme facility of Goran Marstrom, and professional marketing drive of the organization, and you have a winning combination in Seacart 30 trimaran.  The boat is designed for a well-defined market and because of that the target audience get no compromises in this ocean-going trimaran that flies 2 hulls in moderate conditions and packs its vacuum baked carbon body and components tight on the trailer and in a shipping container.  The price is high for the size but not for the speed, and the quality of Marstrom’s shop has never been offered at a discount.

Honorable Mention:

The Gunboats are fast, beautiful and sell very well for their high price per foot of length.  Their small model range clearly displays the direct transfer of racing technology to not so common folks who have the stash of cash to have them. They have a unique style and built in speed that are great signatures. They also advertise with us but we won’t hold it against them.

Worst Multihull Effort:

The 60 foot ORMA class trimarans continued to capture our fascination but the class became completely dominated by a design with the most bucks and time invested in it.  When it came time to race to the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean the boats started breaking and flipping in conditions more moderate than the devastating storm of the first days of the previous transatlantic race.  Some boats have been lost, some seriously damaged, not many boats are in the building pipeline and the class appears destined for a new organization.

Dishonorable Mention:

We made the mistake of thinking the Geronimo guys were cool - wrong. First they jerked us around regarding sailing on the boat, and then promised and failed to give daily reports on their "record" run to Hawaii, which had to be one of the weakest "records" to get. They grandstanded as if it was some big deal, which it wasn't. Neither are they.

Best OD Performance:

Paige Riley in Laser Radial.  This 18 year old from Florida started the year solid with a win at Miami OCR and never looked back, quickly following up by a win at the Princess Sofia Trophy Regatta in Spain.  At the Laser Radial Worlds in Brazil she won with 35 points over 10 races, a 20 point lead over the second place.  This was her second world title in the class.  She also won the ISAF Youth World Sailing Championship in Busan and is ranked first in the class going into 2006.  She's all that.

Honorable Mention:

For all intents and purposes IMOCA Open 60 monohull class is OD racing and its president Mike Golding has become one of the most experienced visionaries of the class.  This doggedly dog does not bite.  Too often that is.  Mike’s been in the solo ocean racing game for a very long time but the outright victories have been very hard to come by in his efforts in the Open 60 class.  He always made the Vendee victory his ultimate goal.  This time Mike always remained in the contention and was part of the amazing spectacle bashing his heads with Jean Le Cam in outrageous power reaching conditions coming up to the finish.  Unfortunately he ultimately lost the battle for the second place when his keel gave up and fell off 50 miles to the finish.  Mike made history by being the first keelboat sailor to finish a race without the keel and doing it in third place in the Vendee made it that much sweeter

Worst OD Performance:

RMW Marine team racing in this year’s I-14 Worlds.  As much as the authorities in sailing generally fail to act, the International Jury tends to hand out decisions that correspond to the facts as reported.  So we will rely on their decision to grant redress to Irwin/Perry  against one of team RMW boats of Richardson/Barker for sailing Irwin/Perry off the course later in the last race and thus allowing the other RMW boat to win the regatta on points.  The RMW representative’s official response was that the boats were given no orders from their coaches to team race.

The team of Yves Loday and Mitch Booth who are behind the design of the catamaran.  It is nice to see the professionals masterfully apply their experience and nail the design brief like the guys did with this awesome boat.  Hopefully she does not die together with the race that borne her.

JuanK.  No, we can’t spell his name without copying, we cannot pronounce it in a conversation and we heard that he prefers JuanK anyway.  In either event, this Argentinean boat designer has no qualms about aggressive marketing and promotion and needs little introduction today.  While his prior efforts have returned plenty of innovation, the results were not there to show for.  Juan took an aggressive stance and approach to the design of two Volvo 70’s for ABN Amro team, closed his ears to the moderates and detractors and designed on a blank sheet of paper two boats that have so far  mopped the floor with five … er … three … er … five … er … whatever is left on the water at the time of this publication of the Farr designs which were considered to be a default to a winning entry.  We do not recall such massive admissions so early in the race of the pure straight line speed superiority of Juan’s designs.  They may be lopsided for the breeze but they aren’t slow in the light conditions either.  Most importantly, their major components like keels and deck structures have not fallen apart in the 10K+ racing miles of this race so far

Farr Yacht Design.  Now clearly this team normally designs fantastic boats, but they blew it with the VO 70's. Rumors fly that Bruce himself was not as involved with the Volvo 70 designs, which is really hard to believe.  But those are the rumors.  Fully expected press releases and commentary from their office gave explanations for the failures during the first leg that sound half-reasonable on the paper.  Then came the second leg and it was deja vu all over again.  After the air clears of bullshit excuses, however, what emerges is a complete and utter failure in the designs of five boats.  We have no love for him, but Cayard is no slacker - he dominated the windy Star trials in 2004, and of course has proven himself in every arena he's entered, so it would be a poor excuse on part of Farr's office to say that the crew work caused a spill out on each leg of the windy Cape Town in-port race.  That was embarrassing!  It sure does not appear that Farr's boats don't have the control of JuanK's craft in port or on the open track.  Two legs, two upwind nights, four boats with broken backs limping to port, one doing it twice, then another two get hit by keel problems.  In the words of Bowie Bekking, “It makes me wonder although what the Einstein's of force calculations have to say. I am getting tired of worrying regarding this."

FT 10.  We don’t know whether to call it a revolution in internet activity, boat design or boat marketing, but to finalize a boat’s design with the end users, move forward with production tooling and to have hull deposits for 70+ boats is an unbelievable achievement by the Flying Tiger 10 team.  We are just happy to be here for the ride.

CBTF Co.  We are not taking the sides here but there is nothing like a searchlight lighting up big words in the sky “Pay Up or We’ll Sue” to convince the clients to purchase a patent license.  They went after Maximus aggressively and settled quickly.

Tracy Edwards seems to have an uncanny ability to remain in strong contention for this recognition.  Sadly, her presence here this year stems from the same race as the last year’s nomination, the Oryx Cup.  Today it is clear to these observers that this race is dead and that it would be a miracle if we saw the same supporters from Qatar’s government and business circles to get involved in big money ocean race biz.  The winning crews did not see a penny of the prizes presented with pomp during the closing ceremony.  Tracy took Bruno’s dream of The Race and turned it into shit.

Sailnet company dropped the ball like any other crappy Internet startup of the Y2K era.  The sad part is that it was not really a startup and actually provided some useful purpose in our community.

We polled some people trying to make the choice for the best and worst sailmaker and in response received nothing but apathy.  The D4 is widely available to pretty much anyone, so that technological advantage was reduced to design and construction details.  The 3DL continues performing well…when it is holding together, and failing randomly, forcing us to surmise that the Monday Production syndrome that used to be known among the Detroit automakers has crept into the North facilities.  The good news is that there appears to be some uniformity, with the usual exception of some sailmakers having a stronghold on a particular class.  Thus, with apathy, we hand out our Best Sailmaker award to UK-Halsey for doing something outstanding – breaking the mold in the AC arena and getting a contract for sails with Team China. They alone will not make this team a winner but at least it is nice to see a second player in this North lair. Oh yeah they are also suffering through a legal dispute with Sobstad, from which they will emerge as the winner

Glaser Sails, gets the nod this year for not just breaking out from under Ullman, but Jay's sails have been a dominant  force in the 505 an a-class for years and are merging as the go-to sails in Formula18, Tornados, Ultimate 20's and I-14's.

This year lacked for spectacular failures that could be attributed to a single sailmaker so we will go with the safe choice of declaring Elvstrom-Sobstad as the biggest whiner of the sailmaking world.  By now their incessant ramblings on the theme of patent litigation against anyone with a membrane sail are affecting us all, on the business as well as the consumer side.  We wish they competed based on their product, although we aren't sure such viable product exists.  So they get our wax candle for that.

Jesus Christ, if we see one more Hood ad telling us that good sails start with good cloth...First of all, their cloth isn't any good, and neither are the sails. And second, does reciting the same advertising theme over and over for the last ten years actually qualify as marketing? We don't think so.

Best Sport Boat:

The 15 year old Melges 24 shows no signs of slowing down and proves to be the platform and the template for a modern sportboat.  The class shows great strength and strong competition.  This year has been marked, however, by the people trying to extend the use of their Melgi in such adventures as the Chicago to Mackinac run unofficially shadowing the racing fleet, racing one from Maui to Oahu, or bastardizing one for a canter conversion.

While the Melges 24's nomination was a result of the strength of the class as much as of the boat's qualities, the Open 650 designed by Group Finot defines what a fun sportboat should be.  Baked carbon throughout, huge sail area, rotating rig, slender lines and great detail in the equipment specs, this boat brings the "sport" in sportboat.

Worst Sport Boat:

We'd like to give it to the Melges 32 for their class debacle (boats not owned, pulling out of the windy race) at '06 Key West, but that will surely be on the radar for next year. We like the Columbia 30 here but only just, not only for being a marginal performing and expensive 30, but also for badly missing their launch date, poor marketing, and disssing us. It has some nice qualities, but overall they missed the mark.

International 14 dinghy class today seems like a great fix for fast boat blues.  The class is solid, the competition can be found in many places, including Japan and Hawaii, the class managed to control the boat’s development while allowing its member to play with the foiling systems that allowed the crews to try different options with the rig and sails.  It seems to be that everyone who touches this dinghy gets really excited about racing it and that puts it on top of our list.

Honorable Mention:

The TP 52 gets it for not only for continuing to prove what fine boats they are, but also for growing the class, keeping the political bullshit to a minimum and showing just how successful a GP box rule can be. TP 40 and 70's, anyone?

2005 has been the year of the falling keels.  Two Open 60s lost their keels but got to the land.  But those are custom built racing boats on the edge of technological progress.  To have a production boat lose its keel(s) is a completely different story and thus Bavaria Match takes the prize in this category.

Let's give it to the 90' Genuine Risk. A major disappointment on the race course, their failures off the water were even better - crews fired, hired, quitting, unrest, unhappiness and a For Sale sign at the end of it all equal one giant fuck up. Good times.

IMX 35.  In a slew of 35 foot offerings this year the X-Yachts' boat stands out not only by pre-selling over 100 copies to its customer base, many of whom not only step up but also step down from their current rides, but, most significantly, by a promise of having 90 boats on the water by the end of next season.  The promise is not unreasonable given their long-standing ability to mass produce quality boats.  The design is nothing revolutionary but it does expand the X boats' boundaries in some areas and has a plenty of small details that are absent on other competing craft and make the life a little bit easier for the crew.

We like the looks of the new Beneteau 34.7. A 2006 model, it was done in '05 and we like the prod, decent sailplan, decent cockpit and friendly price. It actually looks pretty quick, and we bet they sell a bunch.

Worst Racer Cruiser:

Looks to us like the big J/65 is going to be a flop. They have sold exactly one, well two, but the second one was for sale immediately. Big and so expensive that it is priced out of even J/Boats exorbitant price points. Oops.

Best Builder:

Put a bunch of a custom builders like Cookson, Goetz, McConaghy, Green, etc. into a hat and pick one. You cannot go wrong. These guys are good, very good.

Worst Builder:

Maybe it's old news, but the Schock 40 keel failure here in Dago last month reminded us what a poorly done effort that thing is. Sorry Schock, you can't get away with that sort of product and not get called out.

To the prick that runs sail-world for flat out stealing material right off our front page, lying about it and showing no stones for failing to man up when it was obvious we had nailed him for it. Fuck you Rob Kothe.

Dishonorable Mention:

We like Larry Ellison for running the kind of AC program that would boot John Kostecki off the boat and the team. You fire the guy that really should be running the show? That's really good thinking.

It is probably poor form to give the award to us, eh? We have of course had a terrific year, better content, more traffic, revenue and we still have our fuck you 'tude. Always will. This year, we will stick by www.thedailysail.com from last year, although we never read it, we are told it is good.

Honorable Mention:

This year it was a tossup between the plagiarism's of the www.sail-world.com and more subdued copying of our format by the Sailing Scuttlebutt and of course jumping on the forum bandwagon. All lame, all predictable. Nice work!

The douche from sail world deserves his own, special dickhead award, so Scuttlebutt eked out ahead in this category for not only trying to start some weak ass battle that they ending up losing anyway, but for making some general pointless and unsubstantiated whine in our direction from day one of their forum operation regarding something about somebody copying something. Yeah, like we care what you have to say. But we say this: You win!