So just for the fun of it I tracked down PHRF rating range for some of the more popular large cats. For more see
http://www.ussailing.org/wp-content/...0Handicaps.pdf
Lagoon 42 (2008) .... 165
Lagoon 38 .............. 156
Lagoon 420 ............ 129
Shuttleworth 42 ....... 48
Crowther 44 ........... -12
Newick Native 38 .... -3
White Explorer 44 ... -42
Personally performance is important to me, and if I were in the market would be a serious consideration. So for me the Lagoons would not be high on my list, the tradeoff of performance for load carrying and living space to me simply isn't worth it. But I don't pretend that what is important to me works for everyone.
I like to sail fast. So I own an A-Class
Catamaran that will sail circles around almost everything on this list. My wife like to sail comfortable (and we couldn't get an extra wide slip) so we also have a
Beneteau 381. Different boats for different needs.
What irritates me is when you see a company like Lagoon promote their boats as performance cruisers. They simply are not. Give me a day or so to strip down a Lagoon 42 and I could take tons of
equipment off of it, if we then did a speed test sure the
boat would perform well. But what that's relative to I couldn't tell you.
Lagoon took some video of their new toy in absolute lightship mode sailing with a professional crew, in high winds, and very flat
water, at the absolute ideal wnd angle, likely with
current in their favor, and hit 16kn. This simply doesn't impress me. Now had they shown shots of the
interior with all the floor boards in place, and the
tanks half full, and a
generator installed, and the rest of what the
boat is specced with doing the would have been somewhat meaningful.
But I always keep in mind a Tripp 40 I used to
race on, when we got to
Key West one year we stripped almost 3,000lbs out of the boat after doing the
delivery there. If they were smart Lagoon did the same here. But it's
marketing not reality.