FIRST TEST HANSE 460

When you have spent sizeable chunks of your life crossing oceans, racing dinghies and crashing around the cans or across the Channel on racing yachts, it can take a while to appreciate fully the extent to which the market for cruising yachts has changed in recent years.

I say this even though I have been testing boats of all types since the mid 1990s. Before that I spent some time in the sales office of a yacht builder and, as a child, cruised with my parents back in the days when you pushed your tender across the mud and rowed out to your drying mooring. When you got on board you had no fridge, no heater, no pressurised water, no self-tailing winches, no roller-reefing headsail, no GPS or plotter and an engine that might start if you asked it nicely. For some of us, sailing has always been about the functional and fundamental. We sail because we’re sailors and we enjoy sailing for sailing’s sake. Then there are the other simple, elemental pleasures: the sea, the peace of a quiet anchorage and a swim before breakfast.

Fast forward several decades and things are different. People want so much more from a boat and, in many respects, today’s boats undoubtedly offer a lot more. Priorities have changed, so those of us who test boats have to look at them from a different perspective. We still think about upwind capability in 30 knots