A post out of season, while I am stuck at Limnos by the Mistral (gusting 40k), a complementary one to the one about the Hallberg-Rassy 44:
http://interestingsailboats.blogspot.gr/2016/03/halberg-rassy-44.html
I said on that post : "All this translates in a boat with considerably more overall stability, faster and safer with a better reserve stability and better AVS. HR should be congratulated and this model will be a great successor for one of the benchmarks of HR, the 43."
I was talking about boat design and what the design looked to me. No test had yet been made on the boat but that is not the case now, with several magazines testing it, among them Yachting World, with a two day test performed by a great sailor, Pip Hare, more used to racers than to luxury cruisers like Halberg Rassy and that makes her point of view specially interesting.
Well, she is a great sailor but not very talented in what regards communication skills (she does not talk much) and a thick accent makes a bit difficult to understand all that she says but the bottom point, besides the great cruising interior, is resumed in this phrase "effortless but not joyless".
The images on the movie also give a lot of information about how the boat sails, confirming what I had seen on the design: a contemporary one with more stability, stiff and faster than the previous model. A great boat no doubt with the only drawback of a lack of storage for long time cruising.
Hi Paulo,
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed a very nice boat and as long as you make sure to tick all the boxes on the options list the boat is handled effortlessly. The hull is fairly easily driven, making over 8 knots of boat speed reaching in ~10kn TWS with code 0. Sheeting angles for the genoa is rather wide, so short tacking in narrow quarters is not favorable. The boat suffers in light conditions going downwind as it is heavy with not very large mainsail. But I guess a large a-sail might help!
Cheers!