BOAT REVIEW
Triple the Fun
NEEL 51 Luxury, innovation and outstanding offshore performance make the new NEEL 51 worthy winner of the 2018 European Yacht of the Year award. By Kevin Green
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major attraction of trimarans is their performance, as I experienced while racing through Sydney Harbour on the Orma 60 Team Australia doing 34 knots with one reef in. So, there’s an obvious reason why ocean records are made by ‘tris’ as they have both speed and stability. To a lesser extent this applies to the cruising varieties like the new NEEL 51. Trimarans have 80 per cent weight centralised unlike a catamaran that has 50 per cent on the downwind side, NEEL CEO Eric Bruneel told me once as we walked around his La Rochelle shipyard. This centralised weight also allows them to operate in wider wind ranges than similar catamarans as tris
typically can heel to greater degrees than cats, and their 30-foot beam creates immense stability. Performance figures for the NEEL 51 show an average cruising speed of around 10 knots facilitating impressive 200 nautical mile days, but with fresh breezes reaching 15 to 18 knots is achievable. Of course it’s not just about sailing performance, as the NEEL 51 I spent time on during the boat show at the 2017 La Grande Motte demonstrated, because living space is plentiful as well. Rather than a tiny cubicle in the centre of the Orma 60 that I could hardly crawl into, the NEEL 51 has accommodation in all three hulls which adds up to six cabins and a vast aft deck. Having sailed and raced
MULTIHULL SOLUTIONS MAGAZINE 33