You can spot them miles from the boatshow. A jacket with a discreet sailing logo, maybe a Cork Week bag, right through to the old boys with their yachting caps,all these reveal your fellow travellers to be boat show bound. Some take it a bit far - do you really need to wear red trousers with your blue blazer and why wear your full-on Musto oilies on the DLR when it isn't even raining? I started the game at Prestwick airport but at 7pm, as the curiously attired crowd departed, realisation dawned. Maybe attending the boat show wearing sailing gear is all part of a process of self-affirmation during the nadir of the off-season. Yes we're all sailing enthusiasts and yes we want to identify ourselves with what's going on here.

The Excel exhibition centre in Docklands is easily reached and is a bit like the SECC on steroids only situated right on the waterfront of a huge dock. Like the SECC it has a central boulevard with huge exhibition hangars either side. There was plenty of space but I felt that a bit of the buzz of the Earl's Court shows was missing - maybe just a little of that midwinter festival atmosphere was gone and losing the pool is a bit sad. One huge hall was given over entirely to stink boats and I only ventured in there to reach the waterfront where few masts were to be seen. Some cruising cats were on display plus a couple of large cruising yachts (I liked that blue one - let's go poncin) but most were obscenely huge motor boats. The famous Kingfisher - Ellen's Open 60- was there but as they were not only charging 5 quid for a guided tour but also there was a queue I didn't bother.

 

As usual, cruising yachts were predominant with relatively few performance variants. Moody Yachts, as the distributors for south of the border were hosting Elan Yachts with Rob Humphrey's new high performance 37 in pride of place, as well as the familiar 31, 333, and 40. With super deep keel and well arranged racing cockpit the 37 looks very desirable indeed. I couldn't fault the deck and the interior gives little away to regular cruisers too. One aft cabin is really more of a large quarterberth although the presence in both cabins of massive wooden lockers impinging on the sleeping space seemed strange to me. The enclosed heads module is midships to port like on some of the Jeanneaus which I feel is too conspicuous, a bit like bunging a superloo on the side. I was told that the show example had been sold to the Clyde so maybe this is going to be Salamander Umpteenth. But that's for John Corson to know and the rest of us to guess.

 

 

Over on the Opal Marine stand behind the cruising Bavarias and the execrable Legends lurked the Bavaria Match 38. Plenty has been written about this boat elsewhere but in the plastic it certainly looks good with an efficient cockpit and deck layout. It's never going to pass for a Swan once you get inside but all the basics are there in a perfectly presentable arrangement. The Match 38 should be arriving on the Clyde soon perhaps to into the possession of a well known Clyde racer. What seemed much more interesting to me was the Bavaria that wasn't there namely the upcoming Match 35. which is said to be just a smaller version of the 38 but at a more manageable size. Bavaria is proposing the 35 as a one-design and at a special boat show price of £69.950 inc vat, a suit of Sobstad genesis pentex No 1, No3, mainsail , heavy and medium spinnakers, rod rigging, carbon pole and tactik wireless instruments this could almost be a realistic possibility. Peter Cameron of Kip who showed me around envisages the 35 as a one design option for Sigma 33 owners who want to move on to something a bit more modern and zippy. I think this is quite an exciting prospect. While the Sigma 33s will certainly soldier on for ages, a good many owners have been in that fleet for a long time and I imagine more than a few would jump at the chance of a really fast new one design with cruising potential if they could afford it. It's a space to watch but at that kind of money the new boat is surely, if nothing else, going to cause some upset to secondhand values in the sub 40 foot performance bracket.

 

 

Next I wandered over to J-Boats where the J-109 looked interesting. It is another racer- cruiser which has been designed by people who know what's what. Allegedly they have sold more of these thing in 2 years than they have any other J, which seems remarkable and here is another proposed one design. Normally they sail with just one 110% headsail on a roller furler. However the UK rules propose a single 145% roller genoa. That won't look a pretty sight on a windy day. I don't know what these things rate on IRC with their huge asymmetrics spinnakers but it must be quite tough although J claim they can go pretty straight downwind with the asymmetric. I'm sure they must be great fun to race but maybe it's not a boat for handicap racing on the Clyde. One particular interior feature which I thought immensely practical and sensible was the door which opens from the back of the heads into the under cockpit void. For a racer cruiser this is much more useful than a cockpit locker and at last offers a sensible place to stow wet sailbags - only the J doesn't carry lots of sails. Oh well. Check the pic of the J109 forecabin. You wouldn't want to be in there and sit up suddenly when the pole is retracted.

J-Boats also market the 1720 sportsboat and had one of the new Club versions on display. This, as previously described on Clydesailing, has one-design North Pentex sails, with a reduced size headsail on a Harken roller furler amongst other things, all of which allow ready conversion back to full Class status. One addition which is more show than go is the sexy new moulded carbon fibre tiller but it has been filled with lead to keep it the same weight as wood! Hopefully these attempts to freshen up the design will be effective. It would be a tragedy if such a fun boat were to slip into obscurity but that now seems unlikely. A further modification I hadn't been aware of is a covered pit in the cockpit floor for stowing the outboard when racing. This is a great idea as anyone who has had to squeeze down the 1720's coalhole to fetch the outboard will attest but hopefully the rubber seals will work so that the 1720 doesn't have to drag a paddling pool around the course.

Among the French offerings the new Dufours looked the most appealing. The old Dufour Classics were there but the attractions are the new Umberto Felci designed 40 and 34. I looked at the 34 on my usual premise that only a lottery win would make anything 40 feet attainable and since I have never bought a lottery ticket my chances of that happening are marginally poorer than average. The internal finish on these boats is very fine and you can easily see where Bavaria achieves some of its price advantage. Although tiller steering is standard, the display model had a wheel and the sales staff would attempt to talk a buyer out of a tiller on the basis of resale value if nothing else. The primary winches are right back beside the wheel - not so close that you'd skin the knuckles of the hand holding the winch handle but not far off it. This might be convenient for single handing but how often is a boat like this going to be sailed single handed? If you were racing - which you might want to do- the winch grinder would have to scramble right aft with one knee on the side deck beside the helmsman to get on top of the winch and hopefully the mainsheet man would be out of the way by then. The owner of the first UK Dufour 34 who coincidentally appeared on the stand said that when short tacking he actually hands the wheel over to the genoa trimmer and grinds the headsail himself before taking back the wheel. Weird. Yours on the water with average frills for around 95k.

 

The only new smallish effort on the Beneteau stand was the Oceanis Clipper thirtysomething. Dull as chips but at least they have put a reasonably sized keel on it for once. I didn't visit Jeanneau and the X yachts on display (X-43 and bigger) were way too big to merit my attention. Picture 4 in the strip above is some Cornish Gaffer thing. Beautiful to look at but strictly for those who get off on polishing and varnishing. British Hunter Boats were there as usual with their little cruisers and there seemed continuing interest in their Stephen Jones Mystery 35 cruiser, the performance of which is said to belie it's trad looks and which made its first appearance at last year's show.

Excel has a third (East) hall reached via a covered walkway and here was the wet and windy department ie sailboards canoes and all that cool stuff. I passed though that to take a look at the pool. I don't know how this thing got here but it was a covered massive swimming pool with loads of huge fans down one side. Some kind of radical windsurfing demo was going on but I didn't stay to do more than take a photo for you. It was gloomy, cold and dank.

 

Dinghies and dayboats as usual were well represented. The strangest thing was the appealingly named Virus trimaran. You can work it out yourselves from the picture and maybe we can expect further developments like the Pox, the Herpes and the Ebola all of which could be fine dinghy names. You read it here first.

I find it hard to keep track of all the new dinghies from Laser and RS and Topper. They appear to compete with each other to fill the smallest market niche. One offering which I thought particularly pointless was a very attractive prototype called the RS Elite. This is a big 3 man fixed keel classic style day yacht with conventional spinnaker - maybe 24 feet LOA- I can't remember the exact figure. It's 'only' 16 grand but why bother when you can buy a used Etchells, or a Soling or whatever for less or even a Flying 15 for buttons and perhaps have the chance of racing against another of the same. Despite the racy hull shape and the carbon boom the keel is very shallow with a huge bulb and I just can't imagine the potential market for it.

Anyone wondering about the 4th picture on the first strip - I was amused by the name which appears asociated with big engines and anyone who doesn't know what Onan was famous for should look up Genesis Ch 38 and that's not the Sobstad one.

Amongst all this what did I buy? A pair of shoes and new spectra runner tails for Troy........

 

back to index