19 Jul
While the Hanse 460 has won high praise for its cruising comforts, Adonis is proving the Berret-Racoupeau design also has an impressive turn of speed.
On any given Sunday from late April to late July, up to 90 boats can be found criss-crossing Sydney Harbour in the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia’s long running Winter Series.
One the largest weekly winter regattas held in any port around the world, Winter Series is a ritual for a committed cohort of sailors. It’s hotly contested and you can find yourself racing anyone from an Olympic champion to very competent club sailors who know the vagaries of Sydney Harbour and how to exploit them.
Add to that the series consists of ten races in anything from four to 40 knots and you begin to get an idea of the consistent sailing ability required as well as the calibre of all-round boat performance to feature on the podium.
Only delivered last December, Adonis a Hanse 460 owned by Matt Farr and Ryan Shamier secured a very creditable second in Division “D” in the 2024 CYCA-LGT Winter Series. In fact, Adonis with Matt skippering dominated the back end of the series, winning three of the last five races.
For the Adonis team sailing a new boat, a new design with not much spin-up it’s a big achievement. “We’re very happy,” Matt admits. “It’s been a massive upgrade from our previous boat Lorelei (a Hanse 385). The boat has a lot of power but it’s easy to control and handle, and we have a really good crew who came from Lorelei,” he recounts.
Adonis is hull #105 of the award-winning 460 model which has been a sailaway success for Hanse with over 250 hulls sold. Reviews praise the big cruiser’s luxury lifestyle elements; “this boat exudes style with a capital S”.
Matt and Ryan chose a highly specc’d three cabin two-bathroom version from the dozens of layouts offered. An experienced racing sailor, Matt wanted to test the 460’s performance potential and made several important tweaks to the deck gear and sail wardrobe that have reaped significant gains.
“The (custom) barber haulers made a big difference,” he reveals. “Even with the new Stratis Doyle jib the tracks are still outboard on the (side) deck so the barber haulers improved our tacking angles by about 15 degrees,” he continues. “That was a massive improvement and I fitted them without any extra points on the deck. They now come off after racing and we go back to cruising mode,” Matt explains.
The Hanse 460 offers a selection of sail plans, and Adonis can deploy a custom Doyle jib or reacher, along with a big A2 from Hood. The main is also upgraded, a factory performance option from Quantum. The net effect enables the 460 to maximise its performance across the wide range of wind angles experienced on the Sydney Harbour course.
“We ran a square kite with a pole on Lorelei and even though we’re a much bigger boat and the assy is an A2 and close to 200 square metres it’s easier to handle and gybe than the square kite was,” Matt says.
“We also went with a sock on the kite for ease of handling and some lightweight Dyneema sheets for the gybes in light breeze as we always do outside gybes to try and project the spinnaker around the bowsprit,” he adds.
The Adonis team have also worked out how to get the best out of their sail choices.
“The large overlapping reacher on the second forestay fits into the slot nicely where a racing boat might use a code zero.
“On those reaches where it’s a bit too shy to run an assy we just unfurl the reacher and we pick-up an extra one or two knots than we would just under jib alone,” Matt details.
“There’s also the advantage that if we are getting to the top end of the kite’s range of high teens to 20 knots we just goose-wing the reacher. It’s a lot safer, easier to handle and the VMG is about the same,” he rationalises.
When designing the 460’s hull well-known French naval architect Oliver Racoupeau stuck with the long-standing Hanse feature of a single rudder as opposed to twin rudders favoured by some other brands. Matt believes there’s a discernible difference.
“I see other boats on the course with their dual rudders which I think creates more drag and slow down the tacks,” he argues.
“We can tack extremely quickly and not lose any speed (as both rudders are creating drag) through the tack in comparison to a similar sized cruising boat with two rudders.
“The combination of the Jeffa steering system and the single rudder I think is the right design approach,” he maintains.
The push button technology that’s aided sail handling on the racecourse has also proved handy for cruising. Just a couple days after Adonis was handed over by Windcraft, Matt and Ryan were off, pointing the bow south into the Tasman Sea.
“We headed out and sailed under main and jib from Pittwater to Eden, 220 nautical miles in one hit in 24 hours,” Matt recalls. “We were averaging nine to ten knots as we got out into the East Australian Current and picked up three knots the whole way.”
Despite the 460’s size Matt says it’s easily wrangled by just he and Ryan thanks to the deck set-up and winch upgrade.
“The boat is extremely well configured for short-handed sailing,” he says. “With all the lines leading aft and the primary winches being electric which I think you need if you are doing that. That big reacher is a lot of real estate but you just put the furling line on one winch and the sheet on the other so there’s a lot less risk than doing things manually,” Matt explains.
There are plans for even longer blue water adventures, to Fiji via New Zealand, and possibly Hamilton Island Race Week where Adonis’s versatile sail plan would suit the spectacular island courses.
“We’re stoked with the [460’s] overall performance on the racecourse, but also from a cruising perspective as well just the additional space we have below,” Matt tells Windshift. “We’re really looking forward to where Adonis will take us,” he concludes.
In early press reviews there were predictions that the Hanse 460 would be a pretty quick and competent all-rounder. It appears Adonis has more than lived-up to those expectations.
More information: https://windcraftyachts.com/hanse/
