Boats Marine engines rarely die of old age. They die of overheating, of salt left to sit, of fuel that spent nine months going stale in the tank, and of small jobs postponed until they turned into large ones. Work out which of those four is coming for your engine, and...

Boats Ask any yard what damages boats most, and hardly anyone answers "rough weather at sea". The expensive damage happens in a quiet corner of a compound between November and March, to a boat that nobody has looked at since the last weekend of the season. Winter does...

The first Beneteau I spent real time aboard was not mine. It belonged to a friend who had bought a fifteen-year-old Oceanis after months of comparing brochures, and what struck me was not the boat itself but how quickly the brand question stopped mattering once we...

Relocating to London can seem like an overwhelming task, a labyrinthine operation that requires many steps in a city bustling with life. Whether you're caught up in the thrill of a new business opportunity or drawn by the allure of its vibrant streets, the journey of...

There are two boat kit lists. The one people buy in spring, full of gadgets, and the one that is actually aboard three seasons later, when the gadgets have been quietly left in the garage. This is an attempt at the second list: ten boat accessories that earn their...

The decision to move internationally is a monumental one, filled with anticipation, excitement, and inevitably, a fair share of challenges. As you stand on the brink of this new chapter, the prospect of relocating your life across borders can be daunting. How will you...

Watch an experienced skipper use a marine GPS and the surprising thing is how little they look at it. The screen tells them where the boat is; everything else comes from the chart, the depth, and what is visible out of the window. Navigating like a professional is...

Ask which is better, an electric boat or a traditional motorboat, and you get an argument. Ask instead how many hours a week the boat runs, how far from a berth it goes, and whether there is power on the pontoon, and the answer usually settles itself in about two...

Boats Every season somebody asks us the same question at the fuel dock, usually while their own machine is being loaded back onto a trailer: is the Yamaha Waverunner actually worth what it costs? We have spent time on plenty of personal watercraft, from an old Sea Doo...

Boats The question always arrives in the same season, usually from somebody who has just finished a fortnight of coastal cruising and has started reading pilot charts in the evenings. Yacht or sailboat for a real crossing? We have been asked it often enough to know...

Boats Half the arguments about inflatable boats for fishing come down to one number that keeps getting copied wrong from listing to listing: weight capacity. We went back to the manufacturers' own figures for this round-up, and two of the boats most commonly...

Boats Search for affordable family boats and you will be handed the same five names you were handed in 2019, one of which has not been built since. We went and pulled the current manufacturer prices instead. Here are five boats you can actually order in 2026, what...

Boats There is one statistic that ought to reorder every beginner's shopping list. In the most recent US Coast Guard figures, roughly seven out of ten boating fatalities happened on vessels whose operator had never taken a boating safety course. Which boat you buy...

A yacht is a private getaway on the seas, away from the hustle and bustle of crowded cities. Yachts come in many shapes and sizes, but they have one thing in common: luxury. Successful luxury yacht design is a subtle blend of functionality, design, quality materials...

Boats By eleven in the morning I had walked the port, looked at the same superyacht transoms as everyone else, and run out of things to do in Saint-Tropez that did not involve a queue. The obvious answer, once someone said it out loud, was to stop looking at the boats...

Boats Ask ten people on a pontoon where a boat stops and a yacht starts and you will get ten answers, most of them about money. The regulations are less romantic and considerably more useful, because there is one length threshold that genuinely changes what a vessel...

Boats The cheapest part of owning a motor boat is buying it. That sounds like a warning and it is meant as one, but it is also the reason a first purchase goes well or badly: get the budget, the survey and the paperwork right in the first month and the next ten years...

Boats Kitesurfing has a reputation for being brutal to learn and dangerous to practise. The published injury figures say otherwise on the second point, and the first turns out to depend almost entirely on how the first ten hours are spent. Here is the order that...

Boats Every article about Rangiroa runs the same photograph: a wall of grey sharks in a pass, sunlight overhead, one diver hanging in the blue. What the caption never says is that the diver in the picture has a few dozen logged dives behind them. So I went looking for...

Boats A yacht is a very expensive way to have a mediocre day out if the route is chosen badly. Two people, one boat, one coastline, and yet the difference between a trip you talk about for years and an afternoon of engine noise comes down to picking the right stretch...

Boats Parasailing gets sold with the word freedom and a photograph taken from a drone. The reality on the Nice seafront is a good deal more prosaic, and rather more interesting: eight minutes in the air, a winch, a boat doing all the work, and a set of French rules...

Boats Seven minutes and eight seconds. That is the margin the 2018 Route du Rhum came down to after 3,542 nautical miles of solo Atlantic sailing, and it is why this edition still gets brought up whenever the race is discussed. With the fleet due to leave Saint-Malo...

Boats Fog is the one condition where every skipper suddenly discovers what their electronics are really worth. A radar sees where your eyes stop, and modern solid-state domes do it on a power budget that a sailboat's batteries can actually live with. The Raymarine...

Boats In 1906, on Lake Maggiore, a boat lifted clear of the water and ran at 68 km/h. No carbon fibre, no computer, no hydraulics. That is the number I keep coming back to whenever someone describes foiling as a recent invention, because the idea is older than the...

Boats When the Elan E5 appeared, the interesting thing about it was not the styling. It was that a Slovenian yard had put twin rudders and a bulbed T-keel under a forty-footer aimed at families, and then asked that family to go and race it at the weekend. A decade on,...

Boats The question almost never gets decided by the boat itself. It gets decided by a berth, a calendar and a maintenance bill, and those three things are a lot easier to check than the feeling you get on a test outing in flat water. Rent if you get out on the water a...

Boats Yachting used to be shorthand for royalty and film stars. What actually changed is not the glamour, it is the booking model: a day charter out of Saint-Tropez is now sold much like a hotel night, with a rate card, a deposit and a cancellation clause. That makes...

Boats A shore day on the French Riviera looks generous on paper and turns out to be short in practice. Between the drive, lunch and the return call time, a tour from the coast to the port of Monaco gives you maybe six usable hours. Knowing what fits inside them is the...

Boats Your own harbour you could enter blindfolded. A strange one at six in the evening in August, with a crosswind, a fuel queue and no idea which finger you have been given, is a completely different exercise. The good news is that marinas are far more standardised...