48° NORTH'S TOP 25 RACING SAILBOATS OF 2022

The highly anticipated and hotly contested 48° North Top 25 is back! In 2022, sailboat racing in the Pacific Northwest had the fullest racing calendar and the most participation in several years. The teams that make up this list have sailed consistently well, and frequently — nine of the top ten boats sailed more qualifying races than the five that counted toward their scores.

How do we select these boats? The qualifying races for our Top 25 offer a good representation of keelboat racing in the Pacific Northwest, and include a mix of distance and aroundthe-buoy races, single-race events and multi-race regattas. Our scoring system is on a percentage basis, depending on the size of the class: 0% (did not finish) to 100% (first in class), where the event score = (Finishers – Place) / (Finishers – 1). Overall scores are an average of a boat’s best five finishes. There is no minimum number of races required to qualify. Multi-race events (like the Southern Sound Series) are scored as single events. For the full list of qualifying races for 2023, please check out 48° North’s Seattle Area Racing Calendar (SARC) in print or online (48north.com/sarc).

The crew of this year’s #1 boat, the J/111 Hooligan, is led by Jay Renehan and Chris Lanzinger, who represent Seattle Yacht Club. For some events, Hooligan was co-skippered by Jay and Chris; for others, it was skippered by one or the other. They sailed in seven qualifying events, and finished first in their class in four of those events. Incredible job, Hooligan team!

Congratulations to every one of 48° North’s Top 25 racing sailboats! It is always a privilege to present the list and we offer our admiration and appreciation for those in the racing community who live it and love it, and sail so well.

Photos courtesy of Jan Anderson

by Justin Wolfe

Last month, we started at the end (of the year, not the project), recapping our Jeanneau SunFast 3300 (SF3300) Red Ruby’s last race in 2022, the Rolex Middle Sea Race. This month we are going to step a little bit farther back to the fall of 2021 and the genesis of the Red Ruby Project. After returning from Italy in September — where my wife and sailing partner, Chris, and I had just competed in the Mixed Doubles Offshore World Championships in Figaro 3s — we had the good fortune to spend an evening with Ron Rosenberg and Jonathan McKee. We spent several hours reviewing the event and then talking about what might be next for us. We wanted to do more doublehanded distance races, and were excited about many of the classic distance races around the world (Fastnet, Middle Sea Race, Caribbean 600, Sydney