“Steadfast cruising is the name of the game”


Performance & handling


Between the Atlantic’s proven hull and the yard’s pleasure in building good, strong boats, we expected the 400 to deliver a solidly reliable ride. It didn’t disappoint. The hull is responsive and turns without fuss – it took any chop we encountered without a murmur. The test boat’s twin 330hp Volvo D6s were just right for this sort of steadfast cruiser, and at


a sedate 3000rpm (out of a possible 3600rpm) you will be able to cover 20 miles in an hour once loaded with cruising gear. We clocked 22 knots at half-load. There is also a useful amount of elbowroom either side of this. You can drop back to the mid to high teens with the hull happy to sit on the plane, or push on a bit harder to 24 knots without taking everything out the engines. Open the taps fully and 28 knots comes up


pretty fast, although at this speed you get the feeling the hull is beginning to run on its keel. This is a common phenomenon on boats of this hull design as the underside of the keel begins to generate its own lift as speed increases and tends to indicate that the hull has reached its maximum horsepower potential. As it stands, the hull/hp combo is fine but if the yard intends fitting anything more potent then it needs to get shot of the keel.


From the helm


Everything is in its rightful place but


the viz could be better, and it will be Too much console space can often be as bad as too little because everything ends up being too spread out. But even though there is plenty of room to play with here, all of the instruments and controls are still within easy reach of the skipper. There is space for a top-end chartplotter but the only thing we would like to see altered is the positioning of the compass, as although it is set right in front of the helmsman it catches the eye line of the horizon. Haines said it is going to deal with this by recessing it. In any case the yard is aiming to take an inch or so off the height of the whole console moulding, to improve the view for shorter folk.


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