ARC ON THE FAST LANE

And as subtitle: the expensive and the "cheap" options LOL. The ARC is almost starting and this year we have some very interesting performance cruisers doing the passage, among them two Outremer 51 (picture above), a Neel 45 "racing", a Pogo 50, two Pogos 12.50, a Knierim 49, a Marten 49, a XP44 and a More 55.

It is going to be very interesting to follow the comparative performances of these boats (and others) and I mean the rich and the poor because their price tag is very different as well as the interior space and comfort. The cat and the trimaran offer an incomparably bigger living space with a price tag to match: 750 000 euros for the Outremer 51, and for the standard version of the Neel 45 538 000 euros. This are base prices, not including VAT and the Neel is not the racing version.

The Outremer 51 and the Neel are very different boats, a cat and a trimaran. The Outremet has dagerboards and therefore a good performance upwind, the Neel 45 has not and the upwind performance suffers, but this is a downwind passage and that is not relevant here. The price is also very different. 

The Pogo 50 has a good cruising interior, on a zen way and it is slightly more expensive than the Nell 45, at 591 000 euros but offers a better performance, specially upwind: 

Pogo-50 from Andreas Lindlahr on Vimeo.

The Knierim 49 is  not very well known, it is made by a German shipyard (Knierim) that has made till know 3 49, a beautiful and fast yacht. I could not find prices but I would not be surprised if the Knierim 49 costed as much as the Outremer 51.

The Knierim 49 is a 13 year old Judel/Vrolijk design, a great design and a boat very different from the Pogo 50, that is a boat based on solo racers while the Knierim comes from the IRC cruiser/racer tradition and needs more crew to be fully exploited.

The XP 44 is a boat that comes on the Knierim 49 same line of design development. It's the smaller till now and compared with all the others, the less expensive boat at 358 800 euros. It has a great cruising interior for this type of boat and it will suit the cruising style of a sportive sailor. In fact there is one circumnavigating.

The Marten 49 is another gorgeous expensive carbon boat, designed by Reishel&Pugh. The design, like the one of the Knierim has already more than a decade but was also a very advanced design, with a lifting keel and a great cruising interior. Both boats weight about the same (9.5T) and the design is not very different (IRC derived). Both still look very nice and it seems time has not made wrinkles on these two, that remain beautiful sailboats, and of course, damn fast ones.

And finally the poor men's fast offshore performance cruiser, the smaller Pogo 12.50, at 253 488 euros, a boat that comes from the Solo racing tradition and is designed to be exploited with a small crew or even solo, if the sailor is a really good one. Fast, specially on the trade winds, with an interior that is functional and kind of comfortable in a zen way, it is the voyage boat option for the "poor" sportive couples.

Well, the Pogo is the cheapest boat that can be bought to sail really fast on passage but that seems to be changing with the More 55 being sold for comparatively less money. The More 55 costs about half of what costs the Pogo 50 and not much more than the Pogo 12.50 (295 500 euros). Let's reserve the boat performance till  we see what really is able to do, but looking at the specifications and design, I would say it is a very fast one. The interior seems a good cruising interior, needing some improvements, but that is just the first boat.

You are all invited to follow the ARC. It starts Sunday 22. This is the tracker: http://www.worldcruising.com/arc/eventfleetviewer.aspx
And if you want to follow it more closely and with some interesting company, we are doing it on a forum, on this thread (I am Polux there):
http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f2/arc-2015-a-156268-5.html