Regal 42 XO

The 42 XO earns its place by what it does not have on board. Regal builds this same 42-foot hull as the Grande Coupe with Volvo IPS pods and as the FXO with a flybridge, but hanging the engines off the transom buys you two things nothing else in the range offers: a 25-inch draft with the drives up, and a full-beam lazarette 42 inches high where the engine room would otherwise sit. The first one gets you onto sandbars and into anchorages a 42-foot sport yacht has no business reaching. The second swallows the dive gear, the paddleboards and the spare props that normally end up lashed to the foredeck. If you cruise the Bahamas or Florida's Gulf Coast, that combination is the whole argument.

Now the part I would want to know before writing a cheque. Regal publishes a full RPM-by-RPM performance test report for almost every boat it builds — three of them for the 36 Grande Coupe alone — and it publishes nothing for the 42 XO. No test sheet, no engine option list, not even a horsepower figure on the model page. I have quoted the triple Yamaha F425 XTOs because Regal's own 42 FXO report names them on the same platform, but I am not going to hand you a top speed or a range I cannot source, so this page carries neither. Ask your dealer for the 42 XO's test sheet in writing, and treat any number that arrives without one as a sales figure.

Everything else here is the Regal you would expect at this size. The retractable hardtop and sliding glass doors turn the upper salon into open deck in about fifteen seconds, the Seakeeper 3 option takes the roll out of a lunch stop, and two people can run the boat without a third set of hands. This is a boat for the owner stepping off a big centre console who wants two staterooms and air conditioning without giving up the water they already fish. If that is you, it is a genuinely good boat with an information problem — and the information problem is fixable with a phone call.

— Tony Smith, Founder, Minted Yachts