Beneteau 57

 

Issue: July 2004
Manufacturer: Beneteau

That popular aphorism about technology - that it solves problems we did not know existed - is, I reckon, pretty accurate. For example, how can you possibly live for another day without owning a car that turns on its own windscreen wipers? The utter hell of reaching for the wiper switch when the first drizzle hits the windscreen can no longer be tolerated. But on boats it is a different story. Boat designers and builders tend to use technology, which is appropriate, because it does work that is useful.

The standard Beneteau 57 has one electric winch; the one shown here has two-speed electric winches for the headsail sheets (also used to hoist the main); both headsails are on furlers (the genoa furler is powered) and the staysail is self-tacking. The main is a tri-radial cut to suit the 'Leisurefurl' powered boom furler. This test boat had an autopilot (a fully-interfaced B&G system). The bow thruster is standard, as is the 9.5kVa genset. All this equipment - much of it standard - means that this 57-footer can be handled by one person, and handled easily by two.

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The machinery enables the owner to be free of dependence on crew, one of the great evils of cruising a big (ish) boat. But it is misleading to rate this boat only on its list of machinery, some of it optional. The base boat is a very interesting fast cruiser, interesting, because the designers started with a clean sheet of paper and came up with interesting solutions to design problems. Those options merely extend slightly the boat's abilities, which are considerable. During our sail the breeze built to more than 20 knots, 25+ in the gusts.

We decided to take in a bit of sail. The sequence went like this - ease the mainsheet and roll away a bit of the main by pressing a button, the work of a few seconds. Sheet on the main, roll up the genoa (on the powered furler) and unroll the staysail, which is manual. Put the helm over and in less than a minute we have taken in a lot of sail and tacked. With a bit of practice I could have done all this myself in about the same length of time. The Beneteau 57 has a Bruce Farr hull but is intended as a fast cruiser, with a sensible keel of lowish aspect ratio and a reasonable rake on its leading edge, better to hit rocks with (a fact of cruising life that must be considered) than the now-almost universal vertical, high-aspect keel.

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