6 Exciting Innovation Award Winners at the 2025 Miami Boat Show
Monterey Boats, Solace, Azimut, Yamaha
Innovation doesn’t always come easy to the yachting industry. Rolling seas and fierce winds mean stability has to be factored, as much as possible, into any new boat design. That’s a lot more challenging than cars or motorcycles, which run on hard, mostly even, surfaces. And they don’t have to plow through what often feels like syrup.
But the caliber of the NMMA-BWI Innovation Award winners at this week’s Miami International Boat Show demonstrates how quickly the industry is coming up with fresh boat designs and exciting technology beneath the hull.
Theory has it that innovation trickles down from larger superyachts to motoryachts and then down to smaller dayboats. But in the cases of these award recipients, the design and technology were developed for their specific use cases, showing that the small-boat world is transitioning to a better, easier user experience without help from the superyacht world. These winners will also spur competitors to come up with similar designs.
Post-Covid has been good to boating, featuring technical breakthroughs like autonomous docking, creative uses of artificial intelligence, and an industrywide move toward sustainability.
Here are six winners that are fast-forwarding the boating experience.
-
Azimut Fly 72
Image Credit: Azimut Yachts The Italian builder tends to reinvent categories, and its new 72 is no exception. Instead of the tall-riding, boxy look of traditional flybridge designs, Alberto Mancini designed the exterior of the Fly 72 with a low-slung bridge above on a svelte, fast-running hull. The boat reaches an impressive top end of 31 knots. The bow area, rather than a few seats, is a serious dedicated social area with lounges. The flybridge is open and large, with an upper helm station, “American bar” that can also serve as a galley, and excellent lounge seating throughout. The four-stateroom interior by Fabio Fantolino is subtle and contemporary, as is the large salon.
-
Monterey Elite 30
Image Credit: Monterey Boats Monterey Boats has been known for its cruisers and runabouts for more than 30 years. But its new Elite 30 is a groundbreaker with its fresh design and technology. Its clean lines with plumb bow at first appear European, though the twin outboards at the stern signify it as an American boat. This transatlantic look in the highly popular center-console category features plush, embossed seating throughout, and advanced navigation and entertainment systems. Beyond the Innovation Awards, the Elite 30 recently garnered Boating magazine’s highly competitive “Boat of the Year” award.
-
Dometic DG3 Gyro-Stabilizer
Image Credit: Dometic Marine Arguably the most exciting winner this year was a product yacht owners will ideally never notice. The white-boxed DG3 Stabilizer by Dometic isn’t sexy like the Azimut 72 Fly’s bow area or the MasterCraft XStar 25’s futuristic cockpit, but it promises to have a farther-reaching impact. How? By stopping a boat’s roll stone cold, and therefore making a day on the water a pleasure for those who suffer motion sickness (that’s about a third of the population).
Robb Report experienced the Dometic gyro-stabilizer firsthand in Biscayne Bay on a 34-foot Regulator, which will be its launch customer. It worked as promised in the rolling seas, moving from the boating pitching back and forth when the gyro was turned off to, a few seconds later, a flat tabletop experience that continued to resist wave motion.
Dometic has one significant competitor in the sector, Seakeeper, which does a great job with its range of gyro-stabilizers. But the Dometic newcomer has upped the game with the ability to spool up and down much faster, consume less power, and be compatible with 12, 24, or 48V systems. “The first all-electric precession control gyro fully winds up in 16 minutes and draws from a dedicated battery to do so, then recaptures energy back into its battery during wind down,” said one of the awards judges from Boating Writers International. “The leap in efficiency is more than significant.”
-
MasterCraft XStar 25
Image Credit: MasterCraft Boats Top-seller MasterCraft has always been one of three top towboat brands, along with Nautique and Malibu, but its redesigned XStar 25 lifts it into a new realm. The boat, with 4,050 pounds of ballast, is designed for wakeboarding and wakesurfing. But its new Maax audio system makes it the ultimate sound machine. It includes six subwoofers and 10 cockpit speakers, four tower speakers and six transom speakers, with seven customizable audio zones—including a zone for surfers behind the boat. If that’s not enough, the XStar has a redesigned stern and cockpit, as well as an asymmetrical hull, a yacht-grade interior, and wireless chargers to distinguish it from competitors. Its four-camera system gives the helm operator real-time views from the bow, tower, and both sides of the transom for enhanced situational awareness.
-
Yamaha JetBlaster
Image Credit: Yamaha Influenced by its 1990s WaveBlaster, Yamaha’s newly redesigned JetBlaster series is a modern take that shares the original WaveBlaster’s same ability to turn on a dime, perform waterborne wheelies, and remind its riders that personal watercraft don’t have to be fast, waterborne lounge seats. The 9’9” JetBlaster comes in three versions, the PRO, DLX and JetBlaster, with seating for two and three people. They’re all powered by TR-1 1049cc Yamaha marine engines. The big innovations, according to the judges, included the three-piece polypropylene deck, which allowed the designers to add some very cool curves, and also offers easy access to the engine.
-
Solace 37Pilot
Image Credit: Solace Boats Solace is a relative newcomer to the popular offshore center-console segment, though Stephen Dougherty, its founder and designer, previously established two highly successful offshore fishboat brands, Edgewater and Everglades. The new 37Pilot is a fresh design with an enclosed, climate-controlled “pilothouse” that makes it comfortable to run in most conditions—hot or cold. It’s an innovative feature compared to most offshore center consoles that offer little protection from extreme sun, rain or wind. Beyond the enclosed space, the new Solace can pack up to 1,200 hp with its triple Mercury V10 400 outboards. It also has an AI system that brings together data from charts, computer vision, AIS, and the cloud to create 3-D augmented views of the waters ahead.
