I had a chance to sail a new
Outremer 52 today. Here are my personal thoughts for those who are interested with this
boat..
The one we sailed had every possible options you could buy with a
price tag close to 1 Mio €. She also had rotating carbon
mast, upgraded
sails and famous carbon tiller... I had already sailed carbon
mast catamarans including Gunboat but this was the first one with rotating mast..(I'll come to that later..)
As one would expect, for a 52 ft
catamaran, the
boat has slimmer hulls and relatively small
saloon and
cockpit. Overall volume could be compared to Helia or
Lagoon 450.. The finish is OK but nothing exceptional.
The sea was rather flat , occasional swells around 30-40 cm max.
We were 4 on board all experienced sailors, the boat was pretty heavy and almost always trimmed the best possible way, with the exception of
dagger boards which remained always fully inserted in
water. I don't know how much this would have changed the outcome, but the
skipper said "not much", so we didn't bother about them.During the test we just used the main an standard overlapping gib.
The speed over
water display was not working, so real
wind reading was not available.
The boat is fast but not as much as I thought she could be; AWA display was not calibrated but my guess she can go to 30 degrees if streched. We did around 9 kts SOG at this angle at 20-22 kts of AW. (Gunboat had given 11 kts at couple of degrees less AWA to compare with..With Helia or
Orana we could have had 7,5-8 kts at 35-40 degrees AWA but much more leeway)
Rotating mast add 1 kt or so to the speed but has another advantage; much easier reefing the main. You don't have to turn to full
wind and sometime even furl the gib to take a reef; you simply rotate the mast to the wind..
The boat
sails to every angle pretty well, tack easily.
To summarize;
If you like cruising with yr wife, laid back with the
beer in yr hand, this boat is probably not for you. She is very responsive to trimming, if you are lazy, she may only be marginally faster than an ordinary
charter boat.
She is also not easily singhanded with two
genoa winches apart from each other 5 meters..(This will be less of an issue if you call for self tacking small gib)
The
deck equipment is the best you get in the market.
2X40 Volvo's are pushing the boat very well but I didn't like the electrically controlled gas levers; hyper sensitive.
The added 2 ft to the outgoing
Outremer 49 seems to be paying dividends, the payload now is more than satisfactory.
The
price seems to be in line with those of
Catana of similar size.
Cheers
Yeloya
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