Elan 400 Review

Here is an interesting new yacht from a British designer, Rob Humphreys, and Slovenia based Elan Yachts. The Elan 400 is their latest collaboration and it is indeed a unique boat. It is a racer/cruiser with twin rudders, hard chines and a very distinctive look. Its a look that I find visually quite attractive.

Elan 400: Slovenian Speedster

Lets start by studying the hull. In the plan view, notice that its rather full in the bow at the deck level, fairing into a  moderate beam of 12.69 feet. It carries that beam all the way aft where we find hard chines and a near vertical transom. At 16,500 pounds displacement the Elan 400 has a displacement/length ratio of 141. This is not much lighter than my unabashedly cruisey Beneteau 423, which has a D/L ratio 154. But coupled with a sail area/displacement ratio of 21.1, the Elan will be much quicker in all conditions than my slightly underpowered Beneteau, which has a SA/D of only about 16.0.  With these data points, its clear that the Elan is a pretty sporty ride, but what about those chines and the twin rudders? Do they offer any meaningful advantages or are they there merely for style? Starting with the chines, I would say that they do little, if anything, for performance.  Dont get me wrong, chines have been shown to enhance performance on sailboats. But in my opinion they only make a difference when a boat is in planing mode, which wont be very often for the Elan. I should point out that the Humphreys firm has designed at least one VO70 with chines, and I am certain they make a critical performance difference on such a light and powerful boat. But the 400 is a family style racer/cruiser and I think the chines are there more for style than planing performance. There is nothing wrong with this, they add visual interest and certainly dont take away any performance potential.

Humphreys VO70 at speed. Notice the chine at work, and the weather rudder almost completely out of the water.

What about the twin rudders? Once again, on a VO70 they make a lot of sense. But does that translate to a racer/cruiser like the Elan 400? It would be very interesting to compare a single ruddered 400 with a twin ruddered version. I have no data to support my opinion, but my gut feeling is that in most conditions that average people sail in, the single ruddered boat would perform as well or better than her twin ruddered sister. Here in southern California, we have lots of kelp and I can foresee plenty of fiddling around with a kelp stick and a fair amount of strong language as a racing crew struggles with kelp on our local offshore races. When I think of the added weight, drag and cost of a twin wheel-twin rudder arrangement, I would demand a meaningful improvement in performance from the two rudders and I just dont think its there in typical conditions on a boat of this type. With all that said, Id love to go for a ride on one of these boats.

With its powerful hull,  bow pole, non-overlapping jib and svelte cabin trunk, the Elan 400 is a sporty looking ride.

Moving on to the deck, Im impressed with the innovative features incorporated into it. The transom is wide open, with a seat panel spanning it. This panel is removable and doubles as a gangplank, complete with wheels on the shoreside end,  for when youre Med moored in Monte Carlo. The transom also has a drop-down panel making it into a water-level swim step with boarding ladder and transom shower.

The cockpit is beautifully laid out for racing.

The cockpit itself is very well laid out for a racing crew, with plenty of room to move and ergonomically sensible access to winches, etc. The twin wheels are mounted on fairly lethal looking pedestals and give the helmsman a great view. The general arrangement is typical of the modern racer/cruiser, with short seats forward and wide open space aft. The traveler is mounted on the cockpit sole, which I think is the best place for it and the halyard winches are on the cabin top where they should be. The designers have incorporated a number of tricky features into this area. There is a cleverly designed dining table that retracts into the cockpit sole, retractable footrests for the helmsman, and a recess near the transom for the life raft. Add covered bins for sheets and a retractable companionway hatch board and youve got a pretty busy cockpit. Yet it looks clean and elegant!

Beautifully detailed deck

The rest of the deck is fairly conventional with a low and aesthetically pleasing cabin trunk, jib tracks mounted close inboard and an anchor windlass and locker forward. The boat is equipped with inhauls for the jib, which is an indicator of how serious Elan is about racing performance. Your average cruising sailor wouldnt know what to do with them.

Elan offers the 400 with either two or three cabins. I chose the two cabin version mainly because I prefer to have a dedicated nav station instead of a fold-away chart desk. I think those things look great at boat shows but are not particularly useful. Of course if youre sailing is limited to local waters you have little need for a dedicated chart table and the space would be better used for other purposes.

Sensible layout for casual racing and weekends at the island.

The accommodations plan incorporates a good sized forward cabin with a V-berth, seats and storage lockers. Elan thoughtfully refrained from pushing the berth too far forward so the foot of the bunk is reasonably wide. As in the rest of the boat, there is a plethora of locker doors that conceal lots of fairly small shelves. In spite of all those doors, it looks like usable storage space is somewhat limited. This is because the builder has pushed the lockers well outboard, making them quite shallow, The trade-off is the visual sensation of bright, wide open space below.  I think this is perfectly acceptable given that the Elan 400 is not intended for living aboard or long offshore passagemaking.

In the three cabin version, the chart table folds away to make a full length settee on the port side of the salon.

Given the intended purpose of the boat, the galley is adequate, although you may wish for a bit more storage space here. The aft stateroom is quite large and comfortable looking. The hard chines may contribute to the extra space here, or it could just be that the transom on the 400 is in the neighborhood of eleven feet wide.

The 400 looks fast.

Overall, there is much to like about the Elan 400. The tall rig with non overlapping headsails provides lots of horsepower. The twin rudders should provide precise steering and the deep keel will keep the boat on its feet. As I mentioned before, to my eye this is a pretty boat that has excellent performance potential. While the squared off trapezoid shape deadlights in the hull could have been more artfully designed I expect the Elan 400 to turn heads wherever she goes. I took all the photos shown here from Elans excellent web site and I invite you to visit www.elan-yachts.com to learn more about this interesting boat.

Continue

Finisterras New Canvas

Before we bought Finisterra it was named "The Cats Meow". The previous owner had proudly applied that name in eight inch tall letters on each side of the hull.  And just to make sure there was no mistaking the name of the boat, he had lots of cats paws applied to the hull in strategic locations on the bow, around the name and across the transom. The boat looked like a big cat had walked up the bow, along the sides of the hull and across the transom before disappearing back into a surrealistic cat dream. It really did look like a cat lovers dream boat.  It only took me a couple of days of sitting in the sun with a heat gun and putty knife to get the name and all those cat prints off.

The dodger and bimini on The Cats Meow were a faded shade of green and were at the end of their useful life when we bought the boat. I like the color green, and I like cats.  But I cant say I like green cats or green dodgers, so the day we bought her we knew wed soon replace the green with new cadet gray canvas. The job is just about complete and we are quite pleased with it.

New Dodger

Its always an interesting experience to design a dodger for a boat. In this case, the stainless steel framework was already installed and was in good condition. The challenge was to use the existing frame to redesign the dodger so it meets our specific needs. I like to be able to see over the dodger from the helm and Lisa doesnt like to have to duck under it. Since Im about seven inches taller than her I was able to adjust the height to accommodate us perfectly. This involved lowering it about three inches by cutting a little off the frames and adjusting the angles of them a bit.

I think most of the dodgers I see around my marina are too tall and clunky looking, which is surprising since virtually all dodgers are custom made. I am also of the opinion that most of the time, the person who designs the dodger gives little consideration to the aesthetic effect of the dodger on the overall look of the boat. I understand that their primary purpose is to provide protection from wind and spray but Im not prepared to sacrifice style for the minimal added protection of a taller dodger. So, perfectionist that I am, I took dimensions and photographs and made CAD drawings of the whole thing superimposed on the profile of the boat and puttered around with it until I was satisfied with it. Then I adjusted the angles of the frames this way and that until I had it all just so. When all that was done, I passed this information on to Dan at Harbor Custom Canvas in Long Beach and he, being a master dodger builder, converted it into reality. We had them build the dodger on our last boat and found their workmanship and service to be excellent in all respects then, and they did another outstanding job on the Finisterra.

Lots of Strataglass for good visibility, a full length grab rail and a zippered roll-up section amidships

I chose Strataglass over vinyl because it doesnt wrinkle, its very clear and its durable. Strataglass is also flexible enough to allow for the roll-up center section, which is very valuable in the tropics. Notice that the corners of the glass are radiused instead of sharp. I like the look of this design better and as an engineer and designer, I have always associated sharp corners with stress risers.

New bimini

Our boat came with a bimini mounted to the stern pulpits. The original was about four inches higher than the new one. My goals in lowering it were threefold.  A lower bimini is structurally more stable, presents less windage and is better looking. It actually provides more shade than the old one because it is about four inches longer and the low height helps put the shade where its needed instead of off to one side or the other when the sun is at an angle instead of directly overhead, which is virtually all the time.

We had snaps fitted to the sides and back, and a zipper on the forward side. These are for side curtains and a filler piece that connects the dodger to the bimini and provides shade over the entire cockpit. The side curtains will be made of polypropylene mesh and will attach to the top rails of the pulpits and lifelines. The mesh is fairly see-through and lets the breeze pass through as well.

This view gives a sense of the proportions of the dodger and bimini

Dodger + filler + bimini = comfortable cockpit

Notice that the bimini extends the full width of Finisterras ample stern. The extra shade this provides becomes more important south of the Tropic of Cancer. It isnt visible in any of the photos but I had Dan weld a grab rail onto the aft side of the bimini similar to the one on the dodger. Its fairly handy as a grab rail, but its the perfect place to put the solar panels. On our last boat I mounted them on the aft end of the bimini and made them adjustable so that I could angle them toward the sun. Thats the next project I have planned for Finisterra.

Continue

The State of the Sport

Oracle on its foils. A new level of sailing performance

Ive been thinking lately about the state of the sailing industry in the US, and, frankly, its not pretty for the designers or the builders. Since the "Great Recession" there has been a decline in yacht design activity in this country. With a few exceptions, most of the designers I know are struggling to find commissions and many builders of custom and semi-custom yachts have diversified into powerboats or other products, or simply shut their doors. Is this the natural ebb and flow of business cycles, or are there other forces at work? It may be a matter of business cycles but I think there is more to it than that. Its pretty clear that the recession took a lot of money out of the sailing industry, which is to be expected since many people have been understandably more focused on their economic survival than new boats.

International Laser at speed

Another factor is the way people spend their most precious commodity, leisure time. Sailing is time consuming compared to other sports that compete for your recreation time. Golf is a good example. You can go play a round of golf on a Saturday morning and be home in time for brunch. You drop your clubs in the garage and youre ready to spend the rest of the day doing other things. Sailing, on the other hand, is pretty much an all-day affair. If you just want to go out for a couple of hours, you head down to the boat, spend a half hour getting it ready, then push off from the dock and, if youre lucky, there is a breeze and you go out and enjoy sailing for a couple of hours. But who wants to sail for just a couple of hours on a Saturday? Instead you spend the day on the water, enjoy the hell out of it, then get back to the dock around four in the afternoon. Then you spend an hour folding sails, hosing down the boat, etc. and perhaps have a cold beverage and watch the sunset. Sounds like a good day to me. But for many, that doesnt work because they always have so many other things to do. Further, in many families not everyone involved in the decision-making process is as enamored of sailing as we are, so compromises must be made. Soccer, baseball, lacrosse, tennis, golf, riding, biking, hiking, surfing, etc. all compete for their time and interest, and most of those sports are less work, less expensive and less time consuming than sailing, so its no wonder the sailing industry is struggling.

Another interesting symptom of the sailing malaise is the average age of the people you find out on the race course on any given weekend. Its been going up. Of course there are younger people coming into the sport and I am pleased to see the vibrant junior programs of the yacht clubs in my town. Still, the geezer-to-young buck ratio at my yacht club appears to be on the rise. Among the ranks of the cruisers, both local and long distance, the average age also seems to be on the increase. I guess its all part of that 70 is the new 60 paradigm.

A Hans Christian 38 drives to weather

With all of these forces at work, there seems to be a lot of hand wringing over the changing sociological and economic landscape in the sport of sailing. Declining sales, declining demographics, fewer boats on the starting lines, danger and death at the Americas Cup...Yikes, its enough to make you trade your boat shoes for golf shoes.

For some this is a catastrophe. My God, our beloved sport is shrinking! What shall we do? Well, I have a couple of recommendations. First take a deep breath and relax. So what if our sport is shrinking? Itll find some point of equilibrium, some point where its in balance with all the other forces that work on our leisure time, our psyches, and our multifarious commitments. Second, remember that you enjoy the sport. Remember that there are thousands of us out there enjoying our time on the water. If youre in the recreational boating industry, think about building the quality of the sailing experience instead of the quantity. Take your family and friends out sailing and dont worry that some or maybe even most of them dont connect with the absolute pleasure we derive from it. Ill wager that there is someone who has encouraged you to try something new, mountain climbing, horseback riding or whatever, that just didnt work for you. Those sports are no poorer because you didnt go out and buy a new Stetson or ice ax. And our sport is no poorer because someone came, saw... and decided theyd rather be on a mountain trail.

Left Coast Dart headed your way

Frankly, Im not the least bit disappointed that our sport is in something of a decline. Here in California, in the last year or so weve lost eleven people in yacht racing accidents. The jury is still out on the death of Andy Simpson, the crewman who died when the Swedish Americas Cup catamaran capsized, but the other deaths can be attributed to operator error. So either we need to improve the skills and knowledge of the folks that are already out sailing, or we might be better off if people who dont have those skills took up a different sport, or got the necessary training before heading offshore. Sailing is a lovely sport, pastime, and lifestyle, but its not for everyone so lets just relax and enjoy it. We can and should welcome anyone who joins in, and we need not be concerned when people dont get it and prefer other things. Sailing and the sailing industry will survive and thrive in its own way, its own time and at its own level.

Continue