BlueWaterBoats.org
Primary editorial source · ~108 boat reviews · archived 2023–2024
BlueWaterBoats.org was a long-running independent website publishing detailed editorial assessments of offshore-capable production sailboats. Each review covered a boat's history, design, construction, performance under sail, known weaknesses, and buyer observations: the kind of practical, unvarnished information needed when evaluating a used sailboat for offshore passage.
The site went offline sometime in 2023 or 2024. The boat reviews published there were among the most thorough freely available assessments of bluewater production sailboats on the internet, covering boats from the 1960s through the 2000s.
PassageBoats retrieved the boat reviews from the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) using CDX API snapshots and HTML parsing. The editorial content was used as the primary foundation for the review sections in this database: overview, history, layout, construction, under sail, and buyer notes.
What was used from this source
Boat overview, history, layout and configuration, construction notes, under-sail descriptions, and buyer observations. This forms the bulk of each PassageBoats review section.
The original site explicitly covered only offshore-capable boats. Inclusion on BlueWaterBoats.org was treated as a strong indicator of bluewater capability when setting bluewater_rating.
LOA, LWL, beam, draft, displacement, ballast, sail area. Where bluewaterboats.org figures disagreed with other sources, they were cross-checked against sailboat.guide and manufacturer records.
The set of boats reviewed on the site served as the initial candidate list for PassageBoats. All boats in the database with full reviews trace back to this source.
Editorial independence
The reviews on BlueWaterBoats.org reflected the perspective of that site's author(s). PassageBoats has preserved the editorial substance of those reviews but makes no guarantee of accuracy. Where additional sources (owner reports, race data, design credentials) confirmed or contradicted the original editorial assessment, PassageBoats notes have been added. The bluewater ratings and CSF calculations in PassageBoats are independent evaluations, not derived directly from BlueWaterBoats.org.
Sources
- [1]ArchivedBlueWaterBoats.org (archived, web.archive.org)- Original editorial source. Site offline as of 2023–2024; content retrieved via Wayback Machine CDX API snapshots.
- [2]ToolWayback Machine CDX API (web.archive.org)- Internet Archive's public CDX API used to enumerate and retrieve the most recent snapshot of each boat page before shutdown.