Couple here, planning to buy a
boat in 2-5 years. The dilemma is performance or production cat. Among the latter the FP’s are for us the most appealing, mainly because of the “look and feel”.
The Helia 44 would be a good option size wise for liveaboards. We wanted to try one out and went for a wonderful
charter week in the BVI’s. Not only beautiful
weather but also three days 25 knots winds. Here are our comments:
Helm position
Oh my, it is perfect. I think we could buy a FP just because of this wonderful setup. Comfortable, well protected. Perfect with the separation of
steering and winches since you are on auto-pilot anyway. Easy to
single hand, even short-tacking. The instrument repeaters needed to be angled upwards to be more useful, but that’s an easy mod.
Being a production cat, one would imagine that routing of lines, and what should be on which
winch should be refined to its extreme. But the lack of
clutch for the main
halyard was an odd “feature”. This occupied the middle
winch unnecessary. Overall it was a bit odd that we had to scratch our heads to understand what should go where.
Sail and Rig
Even though the
boat was only a couple of seasons old (-18). The
sails felt surprisingly worn out. The lazy-jack system was quite poor. Hoisting the main was like a
game, pull for a couple of seconds and then wait for a clear track between the lazy jacks.
And then the other way, when lowering the main, despite full battens. It had to be pulled down at the
mast. My amateur observation said the sail would be far better with more battcars.
I think that FP has perfectly balanced the height of the boom. Still able to provide a lounge area, without the boom being too high.
Lagoon are probably more cautious and have placed the boom at a “safer” height. But that comes with a rig that not only looks weird but makes it almost impossible to reach it.
Deck hardware
The davit system was super simple to use. 30s to raise or lower the
dinghy. The
bridle hook was not equally good. Should be easy fixed but expected this to be fault proof already from factory. One of our biggest headaches was the
anchor box. Even only 5m of chain would pile up. Getting the
anchor out, was normally a 15 min activity due to this poor design.
Lack of forward
cleats was also strange. I saw so many FP’s at
mooring balls, where the lines was wrapped around the bows. Quite bad engineering considering that these
boats are made for
water sailing">blue
water sailing and
mooring balls. Unnecessary wear and tear both for the
hull and the lines.
Indoor
We really loved the design of the
interior. Modern and clean, still cozy. The u-shaped
galley was perfect, and you could easily be two
cooking at once. Loads of fridge space and I wish we had these fridge drawers in our home.
Salt water tap is a great feature to save water.
One down side on all FP’s, which is even getting worse on the New 45 is the nav station. It is the worst kind of compromise and made to look good at pictures and maybe boat shows only. The seating position is so poor, but you could probably make some cut of the sofa, and fit a proper chair. Maybe it would interfere on the access to the port
hull, but still worth it.
This is almost a deal breaker for us. I am sure, while on
passage we would spend a lot of time at the nav station. At least when the
weather is not ideal.
Performance
It is difficult to judge since this was the first time on a
multihull. But with sailing speeds between 7 and 9 knots I was quite happy. And beating upwind in 25 knots and still be able to cook and eat is fantastic. It doesn’t drain your energy the same way a full day beating on a mono-hull would do. Tacking angle was incredibly poor, maybe this boat was a bit worse than average with non-folding props etc. But I understand why many
boats actually motored upwind.
Time to bring the pop corns out….
Eddie