A weekend, noticed
Page 140 of Robb Report's June issue carries a single image. A Wajer 55 on open water, given the full page. Above it, a title we did not write ourselves: Best Weekender.
Robb Report has named its Best of the Best every June since 1989. For nearly four decades, the issue has been the American measure of what counts in watches, automobiles, wine, travel, and yachts. The selections belong to its editors alone. They spend the year looking closely, and once a year they put what stayed with them on the page.
That is what makes this one matter to us. Recognition you cannot ask for is the only kind worth keeping.
Built for the days in between
"Weekender" is a word we recognize. The Wajer 55 was never designed to impress at the dock. She was designed for Friday afternoon to Sunday evening — the run out before the harbor wakes, lunch at anchor, friends stepping aboard without a briefing, home after dark without strain.
Or not home at all. Below deck she sleeps four to six: two cabins, a full galley, a bathroom, standing headroom throughout. Her own tender is stowed aboard for the run ashore — dinner in the harbor, then back to the anchorage. When the evening at anchor is too good to leave, the weekend stays on the water — that is the word made literal.
We introduced the new Wajer 55 in May 2025, redrawn from the keel up — at a touch, both cockpit tables sink into the deck, leaving one open floor. She sails in three forms: the open Wajer 55, the Wajer 55 HT, whose hardtop and sliding canvas roof stretch the season well past summer, and the Wajer 55 S, drawn for sport. Recognition this early in her life tells us the redesign did what we asked of it.
Most of what earns a weekend like that is invisible. The hull shape that keeps her flat and dry. Automatic fenders you never see until the harbor nears; cleats and anchor concealed so the lines run unbroken from bow to stern. Hundreds of hours in our shipyard in Heeg spent hiding complexity, so that what remains is the water, the company, and the light.
A full page in a magazine cannot show any of that. But the editors felt it, and that is the point.
"We build for the owner who takes her out on a Saturday morning with the family. That the editors of Robb Report noticed the things you don't see — that touches everyone at the yard."
Dries Wajer
At home in American waters
The recognition lands close to home. The Wajer 55 has become a familiar silhouette on Biscayne Bay, where our own slips at Wajer Bay Marina in Miami keep owners' yachts ready for exactly the weekends Robb Report describes. Come summer, the same is true off the Hamptons and Greenwich.
We came to the United States the way we do everything: directly, with our own team, our own marina, our own care. An American institution taking notice of a yacht built in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands, tells us the idea translates — that a day on the water, done properly, needs no translation at all.
The June issue is on newsstands now. We will keep a copy at the yard, open at page 140. The review that matters most, though, is still written the same way it always was — on the water, on a Saturday morning, by the people the Wajer 55 was built for.
