THERE'S ONLY ONE WAY TO JUDGE A BOAT - Sailing the NEEL 47 Trimaran

well we did our catamaran versus monohull video and one comment we've had several times is hey guys what about the trimarans and the honest answer is we don't know we don't know about trimarans we toured a neo47 at a boat show and we were really intrigued i think we just found our next boat i mean i'm kind of in love with the needle wow but we we weren't going to do a review on the boat because we think it makes absolutely no sense to review a boat that you haven't sailed would you trust a review on a car for example from somebody who's never even driven that car it looks like it would go fast and should handle nicely i never drove it but that's what i think well the same applies to boats we've been waiting for an invitation to go sailing on a triumph ramp you're in and simone thank you so much for offering to take us sailing it's gonna be a lot of fun thanks for coming out this looks like quite a ride it is it's it's a fun boat it's a new 47 it's a 47 foot 27 beam and uh a drought of five points four five point five and uh it's fun boat fun boat to seal gonna be a great day a lot of wind let's go sailing [Music] skip it for now i love it it's such a perfect day to go sailing it's so warm and somebody else is doing all the work i love that part i'm excited yeah here you say it's like a mono very curious [Music] [Music] [Music] ah it's a really nice smooth ride it's beautiful up here off the bow i wish we could just keep going i was really curious to see how this boat handled upwind not just in terms of speed i was expecting this boat would be a little faster than clarity and it was a little faster but i was mostly curious about the ride how comfortable is it going upwind because that's the true test of a cruising boat sure you can go faster in some cases but do you want to and the design differences aren't just between how many holes the boats have the whole shapes are very different as well clarity a leopard 46 gets its reserved buoyancy in the boughs or the buoyancy that helps the bowels pop back out of the water when it encounters a wave it gets that reserve buoyancy by flaring the holes starting about three feet aft of the boughs now that means the boat is very comfortable in most points of sale except getting very very close to the wind at that point the reserve buoyancy comes into play and the bows tend to pop up and down just a bit with each passing wave the kneel was actually very very similar encountering a wave the boughs would pop up just a bit but what was different is that the boat didn't slow down as much as in our catamaran the bows tended to lift up and continue moving forward whereas with clarity we would slow down just a bit yeah she cut through the weight i think this meant that our forward speed was more consistent on the trimaran but in terms of ride comfort i actually didn't notice much difference at all the only real difference is that on the trimaran you do heal just a few degrees whereas on the catamaran you're sailing nearly flat even reaching upwind there is a price to pay for those very narrow fine holes and that is that this is a much wetter boat than our catamaran is those holes slice through the water and the spray is definitely much much bigger than on clarity so we've met two niels before i think a 45 and a 47 and both captains both owners reported some really remarkable passage times and average speeds now it's one thing to get your boat up to 10 12 knots for an hour or two it's a different thing to sail that same boat at 10 or 12 knots for a day or two or five what's been your experience in terms of the speed and performance does the boat deliver definitely and you know when we sealed down from virginia to fort lauderdale that was a five-day sale we had some big wins off the coast from georgia but the day after it was like 20 knots of wind and we were just doing like the 10 to 12 knots consistently we did over 200 miles in 24 hours yeah and it was just so much fun so comfortable to be sailing with a nice pace and it was fun because we were just making jokes all the time saying the things you can do while sailing 10 knots and wearing your house slippers at first glance she looks cutter rigged but that inner force day sail is actually a solent sail meaning that it's removable which is really really cool because you can have a smaller sail for when the wind is high but you can remove the solent and tack back and forth with the jib a whole lot easier as we'll see foreign as you might know we're big fans of the raised helm position for multi-holes and it affords you not just a great view all the way around the boat but an opportunity to organize the lines all the controls for the sails to one spot and the kneel does just that we've got two primary winches and a whole flurry of clutches running all of the reef lines the halyards and the sheets everything can be managed from one centralized spot keeping the lines organized and in one spot keeps the side decks free lines on deck are definitely a tripping hazard with the jib out and the sheets eased the ride definitely settled down oh so relaxing well you got to learn the angles and the the seal settings but actually it was quite a lot easier than i thought it would be so in that regard the learning curve is not steep at all it's more like the maneuvering with the 27 beam that's kind of a thing you got to get familiar with but the boat thruster helps so uh you know but sailing wise well you're figuring out the main thing you're the mainsail like you there's less way to trim it the mainsail so that's what we're still trying to figure that out a little bit yeah but overall it's easier than we thought it would be right what were you looking for in a in a cruiser we were looking for a boat that would behave comfortably but also have good sailing capacities so we've been looking a lot at the numbers like what's the weight of a boat how much sale does it carry and so yeah we were looking for performance boats that might not be as comfortable as some of the other ones but that would move around in water a little bit quicker than uh other cats and what you like you won't mention any particular brands of course so what was this one up against what were some other boats you're thinking of we were looking at the ultramare 45 and we were really interested in that one yep and we weren't specifically looking at looking at a timer and because we had no experience with it like you guys saw this one and tried it out and really loved it so how how easy is it for two people to handle yeah it's it's surprisingly easy to sell this boat with two people it seals more or less like a monohull it's um yeah it's easier than you would think what we really like about this boat is how spacious it is all the light that comes in also having the the master in the main space like last night it was uh we were at anchor the wind starts blowing 20 knots and we are in bed and all you have to do is lift your head look around see how everybody's doing okay we're still you know in the right spot and you keep on sleeping also while you're in your bed you can keep an eye on your instruments uh so you see like everything is fine yeah and that's huge plus it is i think it's a great boat for a couple like we are and but if you have guests aboard you you just simply close the door close the curtains and you still have a very private bedroom and also i would imagine like if you have guests you could close this off and they can be back here right and you can be asleep or they truly have their own hulls they have the almonds right it's completely separate the guest accommodations are completely separate yeah and when we looked at this boat i wasn't sure about that whole concept with the separate armors and was one of the things i was like that's weird because guests have to go outside and then into their own armor but it really is very nice it's one of the pluses because it's so private so it's a it's a big plus and then and guests don't hear you don't hear the conversations guests might have and they don't hear our conversations you know where in another boat it's all the noise travels far and here you know it's you have your your own little yeah area yeah so it's it's it's basic but it works and then we have a great shower over there that shower is huge i mean like wow yeah that's you know we're not camping or anything yeah like this is a nice good shower making an omelette at 10 knots yeah and that's fun to experience that the boat actually uh moves well seals well it's easy to handle you know and if you sit up at the helm at the nav station you know you have your 360 overview you're sitting inside you're nicely protected and only if you're going to change the sails you know put a reef in or change the the head sail you know then you're going to be exposed but other than that you're so covered it almost felt like you were cheating you know like hey we should be sailing we should be miserable we should be wet so you're you can control the autopilot from there yeah yeah every time yeah exactly all right let's get real and talk about the neil yeah how did you get a good feel i i did here's her spiel it's got a keel does it does it heal it does heal just a little bit i mean i like red but does it come in teal oh that's too much that's too much here we are back on clarity and uh she whispered to me she said she's a little bit jealous i know she heard us say we could just keep going on that needle yeah it was so much fun and we really learned a lot now clarity and all boats all boats are a compromise there's always design things you give a little here you get a little there and on and on and on so it's it's not like there is one boat that is better than another and i think we've said that about the mon hall versus catamaran thing and i think we'll extend that into trimarans but we learned a lot here yeah i think that we always ask people when they want to do consulting with us is what are your plans do you plan on having crew with you yeah are you going to have lots and lots of guests and that's maybe one of the first things we could talk about with the kneel is the radically different layout than we're used to yeah i'm ready to convert clarity's salon to a master bedroom that is so key for a husband and wife crew or just a crew of two to just have the living accommodations be on the same level where as yarn was talking about the wind comes up in the middle of the night and you just raise your head you've got a panoramic view you can see the instruments in front of you that's really really nice you could just be off watch and be right next to the helm position i know that's really nice the trade-off is of course that the guest accommodations are in the amaze and you don't have that close-knit feel if you're a crew of more than two i think it'd be kind of interesting to be underway and trying to sleep down in one of the almas i mean is that a really bouncy ride i don't know um and the question would be how often does that happen maybe it's not a significant thing for you i think we're gonna have to go back and sail that again and sleep down in those almonds i didn't even think of that otherwise the layout was so impressive to me um the big benefit with the multi-holes is a lot of square footage and that was one of the big selling points with clarity is we've got this huge back porch along with a living room in the salon and i had always thought that the trimarans gave up a lot of that living space that was absolutely not the case that was a generous sized galley yeah oh that galley was awesome and the visibility and the view from the galley so much counter space you had to pull out drawers for the fridges you had a great view it was awesome it was really cool and then next to that you've got kind of a living room sort of situation with the large door that goes into the outdoor space so it's kind of just one large space and it made the boat feel really really big i really liked how the decks were clear of all the lines it was very clean this is a big hazard actually on boats where you've got the lines let across the deck and they can roll underfoot they can be very slippery when it's wet so the kneel has got all the lines led to the helm much like clarity does and it gives you a feeling of being secure on the side decks which are wide enough i would also say i loved the helm position i'm a fan of that raised helm like larry has right you get the view from up there you get the centralized controls and then the rest of the cockpit is just clear for living space so you call it the solent well it's not that i call it a sun it's what it's called i mean i thought it was a staple so a cutter rigged boat has got two head sails as opposed to a sloop and on this boat the inner four-stay sail is removable and i guess technically speaking correct me out there if i'm wrong oh they will they will it's called a solid and that's really really cool um on our first big cruising boat it was cutter rigged so you had an inter force day sail that was on a furler and we used that a lot when the wind piped up yeah and you saw as we headed out on the kneel we were under that that stay sail or that solent i should say but that stay sail is in the way if you're tacking a jib back and forth on low pressure we have to we had to roll up the jib to tack it across on the kneel with the solenoid you just lower that sail and then you've got the jib that was really cool yeah and i didn't mention it uh when we were out there sailing but that solant is on a self-attacker so you don't really have any sheets to manage when you're tacking the stais or the solenoid yeah so that's really nice i really was impressed with how the boat handled yeah the fine entry boughs really made for a smooth ride the question is is that a radical difference between clarity and the neo47 it was cool that we got to test it in some pretty bouncy conditions and i would say it was radically different in that we kept our speed yeah we kept moving forward whereas clarity uh you know the motion isn't terribly different and i don't want to make this sound like it's a drastic difference but with clarity when she's going upwind with a bit more girth in the forward edge of the bows she does lurch a little bit more and i think that that slows us down yeah you can see it when you're watching the knots yeah yeah we'll hit a big wave set and the boat speed will go from eight and a quarter to six eight or seven four so we might be a little bit more sensitive to a head sea with clarity whereas neil and probably the finer entry bowed catamarans like an ultramare they're going to slice in the question and this is probably something we can leave for the sugar scoop is how big a deal is that in the cruising world how much are you going upwind i gotta say mostly you're not going up with much but those five for 10 of miles that you do might be better suited on the nail yeah i would say that the one thing i noticed in relation to that is the spray was way worse on the meal now that was exciting and i thought it was really fun to see that water hit you while you were filming i was getting washed on the decks a little bit but yeah i i definitely felt like hey this is a wetter ride and you're going to clean off a lot more salt yeah and i think if we had more experience across a wider variety of performance boats i'm thinking that the performance boats in general like the shoning that we sailed in sea trial and the utromer that we see trial they're also quite a bit wetter so it may be a displacement issue and also just the fineness of those bowels really cutting into the waves and the spray peeling off but uh yeah that was a big difference yeah i really liked that it's so different than every other boat out there every other catamaran multiple like you really feel like you're hey there's something special here and unique yeah definitely feels different than your other average cruising multi-holes there's something cool about being on the innovative edge of design not to say that catamarans can't be innovative but if you look at the world record holders for passages they're all held by trimarans not by catamarans so there's definitely the innovation and kind of that bleeding edge tech and design that i think the neo captures all right so i want to talk about a few things that struck me right away that i didn't love yes so a few issues that maybe either are better on clarity or at least could stand some improvement and the list is very short yeah and it also is something that could be just take some time to get used to it and get you know your feel for it but the first thing i noticed was the anchoring situation okay yeah we got that one oh yeah now clarity situation isn't great with it being aft of the bows in kind of the midship area but i have learned to deal with that and in comparing it to what neil is dealing with i really appreciate clarity situation now it's a tough thing because on the kneel with these vertical bows or i think they're even called reverse bows there is a lot of fiberglass in the way of your anchor road and your anchor and so what neil has done is they've created an extended sprit where the anchor is pulled up from but it makes it difficult to access yeah and and you really only need access for your snubber or bridle and if you don't know what this number or bridle is it's a thing that you connect to the anchor road from the bows of the boat and that helps with the boat swinging back and forth if you didn't have to access that snubber you probably wouldn't have a big issue with how they've got the anchors designed but it's it's definitely something that would take some getting used to yes exactly and like i said it's that's something that it took me a while to get used to clarity so every time we deploy the anchor and retrieve it we are paying very very close attention to keeping the boat lined up with the road which we should be doing anyway but it makes it extra challenging on the flip side of the the anchoring issue i don't want to call it an issue is they've put this bow sprit out there to get the anchor away but it's also a fantastic sprit for flying a screecher or a code zero an asymmetrical spinnaker anything like that with clarity and with a lot of catamarans we've got the sprit of course that articulates and then the support for that comes up from the boughs from down below there's different names for that some people are calling them a dolphin striker but uh the solid sprit is much more stable and i really like that about the design on the nail that's a good point this is probably a minor thing but i could see a situation where it might be a bigger deal and that is where the dinghy is stowed on the kneel it's got this wonderful setup where you use a lifting line off of the boom to raise the dinghy out of the water and then you set it in these these metal chalks and what i noticed on our sail was that some of the waves were actually hitting the dinghy from below and it was it was bouncing just a bit and i could see a situation where the seas are even larger where that could be a problem the good news here is this is not a difficult thing to solve you could have chalks that are much higher off the water or you could just raise the chalks that they do have up with some sort of uh with some sort of blocks and this would be a smaller problem but i think that underway on the ocean i would probably remove the dinghy altogether what i did like about their transom situation is that they keep the life raft back there in the extremely small chance of the boat capsizing and going inverted the life raft is right at water level i thought of something so the ammas are they protrude out a little bit as you walk on the decks and they don't have non-skid on them so you definitely can't step on them okay the side decks have non-skid but you're talking about the little we're not very technical here's a little pod the nice cell i'm not sure what it's called and you can sit on it it's nice but it just if you step on it you're gonna slip yeah if it's wet you're gonna slip this of course is extremely easy to fix either you could put some non-skid down or you could use something like cdec problem solved this is a couple hundred dollar fix as it is though it looks really cool yeah yeah just don't step on it i did just think of one more thing that i didn't love as much as i love about clarity is we have two engines that's true maneuverability now they do have a bow thruster so that helps but as far as redundancy i do like having two engines i mean it's really really cool to have the engines so far apart on a catamaran that you can just spin in your own length as yarn was saying maybe takes a little bit to get used to the single screw and the bow thruster but as he said not a difficult boat to handle at all but the engine axis was great on the nail the engine access was fantastic having a real build under the the center hole where you can put your generator and your batteries and your water maker and the main engine that's really really nice on the catamaran it's spread out a little bit more what did we learn i think we learned that sailing a trimaran is not a whole lot unlike salina catamaran yeah it heals just a little bit but in terms of performance i think that they are comparable in terms of displacement versus speed i think the ride comfort was very very similar um i give the edge though in upwind performance to the trimaran part of that has to do with the fact that it's got a keel the needle's got to keel and it draws about five i think ewen said it was 5.4 feet that would maybe be a little deeper than i'd like for a cruising boat but that's certainly not a deep draft boat it's just we've gotten kind of addicted or used to our four and a half foot draft allowing us to sneak into all these cool little spots like prime key where we are right now well thank you so much i hope you enjoyed our spiel on the kneel we did it again we can't help ourselves thank you joran and simone we really enjoyed meeting you and hanging out and we hope to see you again soon hope we can connect again maybe go for another boat ride or take you out on clarity and see what you think of this ride thanks everybody for watching leave a note to leave a thumbs up subscribe we really appreciate it yeah if you'd like to help support this show go ahead and smash that like button and that really does something to the google algorithm to make us more important i don't know what the deal is and extra special thanks as always to our patrons we are blown away by your generosity so thank you your generosity and your overall support lending us vehicles we're back in the states helping us get gear mailing stuff to us we really feel like i'm going to sell cheesy here it feels kind of like a family a little bit it's a community but you feel like family does and just the way everybody talks to each other on the patreon platform it's it's very supportive so thank you and in the spirit of having more of a family atmosphere with our patreon we feel like sometimes we can speak a little bit more freely for better for worse and that's what you're going to get in the sugar scoop that's the extra video that we send out to the patrons every every week and this week we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about the neil but also boat reviews in general not just from us but from other youtubers controversial we'll try not to make it controversial because we know everybody is out there trying to help and develop the group wisdom so we'll be talking more about that in the sugar scoop join patreon to be a part of that all right see you next week [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The O'Kelly's

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Id: _RbPfndEjR4

Length: 30min 57sec (1857 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021