Design
The 2023 Fastnet Race was the ultimate test for the First 36 and it performed extremely well, coming 13th in the highly competitive IRC 1 class. It was the only cruising-oriented boat in the top half of the fleet
The F36 is fun to sail at any wind speed
Lorenzo Argento, designer
While working with the Seascape/ Beneteau team on the preliminary brief and concepts, it started to excite both my memories - I spent few months on a First Class 10 back in the Southampton days, sailing her from Newport RI back to England - and my current (given that nearly 40 years have gone by) dream to own and sail the “perfect” boat. I have been lucky enough to have
sailed a number of boats inmy career and when asked what is the “perfect” sailing boat,my answer has always been pretty vague. At this point Imay have an answer: performance. Performance is not simply speed or
ability to surf in anything above 12kts TWS off the wind. Performance is the pleasure of steering a well-balanced boat in breeze fromsix TWS up to 35 TWS. It is the pleasure of being close to the water. It is the pleasure of being on a big, yet small boat which feels very “safe” and behaves comfortably yet has the loads of a light boat and is perfectly manageable by a 60-year-oldman! Performance is to feel safe, in control, sailing at 15/16kts. Performance is to pull together a bunch of friends to race the Aegean 600 and feeling at peace in the very demanding weather conditions. Performance is to use exactly the same package to go cruising in one of the best, yetmost demanding, cruising grounds on the planet (Greece). Performance is easy maintenance (read easy cleaning!) and very practical, comfortable interiors which you literally “hose down” to clean. Performance is integrated structural components that are very well executed, very well engineered and proven to be very solid under all conditions. I must credit the work of everyone
involved. The Beneteau team, the Seascape team, Sam Manuard and his ability to to summarise his wide experience (both as a sailor and creative designer) into a very easy to “read” and use package. Pure Design for optimising what may seem an easy boat to design, but given the weight constraints for the given construction technology (polyester resin and E glass), came up with a superbly optimised scheme. What else? As a user - owner - this is what I mean by the perfect boat.
68 SEAHORSE
crewed entry and that a crew with some pro sailors was provided so that the opportunity could be used as a test of the boat’s racing potential. The boat was not fully optimised for IRC, it was a standard boat, although rigged with a carbon mast. Also, it’s important to note that this wasn’t a fully professional, company-endorsed team which had gone through actual training with the boat. We had no time for trimming, testing or tuning and we had not developed an optimal sail plan based on polars. The team came together two days before the race, a mix of eight pros and amateurs from seven nations. None of them had sailed together before. But it was a strong teamand an honour
‘A perfect opportunity for putting the First 36 to the ultimate test’
andmain only. Only the last 100miles were sailed under gennaker. Still – and I find this truly amazing – we came 13th in IRC 1, a class withmore than 100 entries. Only roughly 60 per cent were able to complete the race at all. It was the smallest boat in IRC1 and at least in the top end of the fleet it was the only cruising-oriented boat. The competition was professional crews who knew their raceboats really well – boats optimised and proven to performwell in IRC. And it’s obvious that with an optimal sail plan and some training and tuning, we could have been at least three to four hours faster, which
forme, as a sailing journalist, to be a part of it: SamManuard was the skipper, and JochemVisser was watch captain, Jure Jerman and formerMini pro AndrazMihelin were also part of the crew. But it’s also worthmentioning thatmost of the race was upwind, which is not themost distinctive strong point of this boat. Eighty per cent of the time the race was sailed with jib
would have put us in top five. Had the race been sailed predominantly on open wind angles, goodness knows whatmight have happened. In the aftermath, Plevnik sounds
pleased too. ‘Looking back’, he says, ‘the Fastnet became the final proof of concept. We now feel that we can tick all the boxes, lean back and say that we really created the boat we envisioned when we started working on this dream back in 2017.’
www.beneteau.com
The success of this boat is down to achieving a balance between good all-round boatspeed, easy handling, structural stiffness and seaworthiness in a high-volume hull, according to its designers
❑
RICK TOMLINSON
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