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In addition to the antenna selection, make sure you pick good radios (personally I stick with Icom and Standard Horizon as the 2 "gold standard" brands outside of $$$ commerical stuff). And use good cable to the antennas, especially if you have a longer cable run. Keeping the run short helps reduce loss in cases where you're using a cable built into the antenna or don't have room to run huge coax.
Cable-wise, the Shakespeare Galaxy antennas come with RG-8X, which is decent cable as long as you can keep the run short. Ideally, if the run is shorter than the provided 20 foot cable, you should cut off their quick connect setup and install a new PL259 yourself to shorten the cable to the needed length. If needing a run over 20 feet, I'd give serious consideration to an antenna that doesn't include a cable and then spending the money on some good, heavy cable. Just stay away from the LMR series coax for marine use, as it's not as corrosion and water tolerant as some other cable types.
Some cheaper antennas come with RG-58 cable, which is pretty bad for losses at VHF frequencies and shouldn't be used for more than a few foot run in my opinion.
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