2023 beneteau sailboats

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NEW MODELS 2023

For the 2023 season, BENETEAU, JEANNEAU, PRESTIGE, LAGOON, EXCESS, FOUR WINNS and WELLCRAFT unveil their new models in the 4 nautical universes of Dayboating, Real Estate on the Water, Monohull and Multihull Sailing.

• Cap Camarat 10.5 CC -  Discover it...

Real Estate on the Water

•    X60 - Discover it...

Monohull Sailing

• JEANNEAU YACHTS 65 – Discover it...

Multihull Sailing

Management & experts linked

Yann Masselot

Chief Brands & communication officer

The management of all the Brands and Communication of the Groupe Beneteau was entrusted to Yann Masselot in July 2022.

VP. Boat clubs Development, Boating Solutions division

Paul Blanc is in charge of developing Boat clubs and new businesses within the Boating Solutions division, headed by Bruno Thivoyon since the September 1, 2023.

Erwin Bamps

PRESTIGE Brand Director

Erwin Bamps is PRESTIGE Brand Director since November 1, 2018.

Thomas Gailly

LAGOON Brand Director

Thomas Gailly is LAGOON Brand Director since October 2020.

Thibaut de Montvalon

EXCESS Brand Director

Thibaut de Montvalon is EXCESS Brand Director since January 1st, 2020.

Nicolas Harvey

FOUR WINNS and WELLCRAFT Brand Director

Nick Harvey is FOUR WINNS and WELLCRAFT Brand Director.

JEANNEAU - DB/43

September 6, 2022

JEANNEAU - Merry Fisher 1295 FLY

FOUR WINNS - TH36

WELLCRAFT - Wellcraft 355

PRESTIGE - M48

BENETEAU - Oceanis Yacht 60

BENETEAU - First 44

JEANNEAU - Jeanneau Yachts 55

LAGOON - Lagoon 51

EXCESS - Excess 14

Linked topic, on the horizon 2022.

About Groupe Beneteau

Founded 140 years ago in Vendee by Benjamin Beneteau, Groupe Beneteau is nowadays bolstered by an international presence of 23 production sites and a global sales network.

Groupe Beneteau posted €1.785 billion turnover in 2023 and has a workforce of nearly eight thousand employees, mainly in France, United States, Poland, Italy, Portugal and Tunisia. 

A world leader, Groupe Beneteau's nine brands in its Boat Division offer more than 135 models of pleasure craft to meet the diverse needs and sailing projects of its customers, whether sailing or motoring, monohull or catamaran.

Through its Boating Solutions Division, the Group is also involved in services covering daily or weekly boat hire, marinas, the digital sector and financing.

Its Habitat Division is a major European player in outdoor accommodation. Its three brands offer a wide range of mobile homes. It has nine hundred employees split between six production sites in France and one in Italy. 

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Beneteau First 36, Sailing World 2023 Boat of the Year

• By Dave Reed
• December 16, 2022

Sailing World Magazine’s  annual Boat of the Year tests are conducted in Annapolis, Maryland, following the US Sailboat Show. With independent judges exhaustively inspecting the boats on land and putting them through their paces on the water, this year’s fleet of new performance-sailing boats spanned from small dinghies to high-tech bluewater catamarans. Here’s the best of the best from our  2023 Boat of the Year nominees »

The Total Package

• Beneteau First 36 2023 Boat of the Year
• Stated purpose: Shorthanded racing, club racing, coastal cruising
• Crew: Solo to six
• Praise for: Build quality, deck layout, versatility
• Est. price as sailed: $345,000

Like a runaway, the Beneteau First 36 careens across a westerly-whipped Chesapeake Bay. The boat’s big-shouldered spinnaker and mainsail are silhouetted in the early October morning light. It’s making trees on the Eastern Shore as we peg the throttle down to keep chase in a 19-foot RIB. The four crewmembers on board are having a casual conversation—like no big deal—when a cold and meaty gust fills the spinnaker. The leech flickers, and the boat surges forward onto plane. Twin rudders zipper the slick streaming out from the transom as the helmsman, hands at 10 and 2 on the carbon steering wheel, effortlessly weaves the boat across waves tops. The boat is, as the saying goes, on rails.

“Wicked,” is how senior Boat of the Year judge Chuck Allen summarizes his experience when he steps off. “That boat is going to be hard to beat.”

Three days and 10 boats later, nothing comes close to usurping the Beneteau First 36 as the obvious and unanimous Boat of the Year, a boat that has been a long time coming and overdue. It’s a boat that will serve many masters.

Beneteau initiated its First 36 project in 2019 by surveying a broad focus group of First “Point 7” owners and dealers about what they wanted in the marketplace, and the takeaways were: 1) Not another ­displacement boat—it had to plane. 2) They wanted a lounge, not a dining room. 3) They wanted their nav station back, and 4) for that, they were OK with having a smaller head.

Given the boat was to meet all three of its club racing, shorthanded and cruising demands, the brain trust assembled inside and outside of Beneteau focused on No. 1—keeping it light and fast. Naval architect Samuel Manuard, the new hot talent of the IMOCA 60 and Class 40 scenes, did the hull, keel and rig. Pure Structural Engineering took care of the structure, and the weight-obsessed glass slingers at Seascape’s factory in Slovenia ensured the boat came in at not a pound more than 10,580. At that weight, of course it’s going to plane.

The entire boat is ­vacuum-infused with CoreCell (hull) and PVC (bulkheads) from the deck down, inside and out, and everything, except the fridge, is somehow a piece of the structure puzzle.

“We are saving big weight there, as furniture is also part of the structure, and all of it glued together makes the boat extremely stiff and very light,” says Beneteau’s Tit Plevnik. “What is special is how calculated it is. In mass-production building, you can’t rely on precision, but we do. The boat is built to the same standard as a pure ­racing boat.”

“The moment I saw it, I knew it would be good. It’s a great-looking boat at the dock and even better with the sails up.” —Greg Stewart

Built like a race boat, the judges all agree it sure sails like one. “It’s a big 36-footer,” says veteran BOTY judge and naval architect Greg Stewart. “It’s a full-ended boat that has a hint of a scow-type bow with a lot of buoyancy forward. Looking at the numbers, what they achieved with the weight and its placement is impressive—10,000 pounds for a 36-foot waterline length is a very good number. I could tell the minute we put the spinnaker up it was a slippery boat.”

Stewart set the day’s top speed at a tick over 18 knots and says: “I remember feeling the puff hit and load the rig, and the boat just scooted off with really nice steering. It felt like a Laser when you get it in that groove and it just levitates. With the dual rudders, which are pretty long, the boat has more of a power-steering feel upwind, so it lets you do a lot of things. There’s so much control, which is a good thing because you can drive out of situations, but at the same time, it’s easy to oversteer.”

Multiple cockpit mock-ups done at ­different heel angles produced a workspace that the judges could find no flaw with. “It’s all legit, easy and clean in the pit,” Allen says. “With the four of us in the ­cockpit, we had plenty of space to move around and were never into each other.

“I was doing a lot of trimming downwind,” Allen adds. “You can feel the boat take off. It was really stable and easy to handle. The thing is light and fast, and we did push it to try and wipe it out, but it was hard to do.”

All the judges praised the clever location of the primary winches on sloped coamings, which were easier to trim from than a traditional winch-on-the-coaming setup. “They’re at the perfect height,” says judge Dave Powlison, “and with them angled like that, you don’t have to crane your neck to see the sail, and the lead is virtually override-proof.”

Also noteworthy is the generous space between the high carbon wheels and the cockpit walls that allow the helmsman to slide forward without having to step up and around the wheel. The jib trimmer has easy access to the three-dimensional clue adjustment systems, and for the pit, there’s plenty of clutches, redirects and cleats to keep everything sorted and tidy.

The standard spar, and that on the demo boat, is a deck-stepped Z Spars aluminum section with Dyform wire rigging that carries 860 square feet of upwind sail area, which Stewart says is considerable for the displacement of the boat. The mast is well aft, which really stretches out the J dimension and opens the foredeck for a quiver of headsails—for this, you’ll find two tack points on the foredeck. There are four halyards total: one for a masthead gennaker, a 2-to-1 for a code sail, a fractional gennaker, and a 2-to-1 staysail. Allen, a semi-retired sailmaker, put an estimate for a complete race inventory at $60,000, which would put the boat on the racecourse for roughly $400,000. (Base boat is priced at $345,000.)

When the race is done, however, how about that interior?

Step down the wide companionway steps into a space of design simplicity and efficiency, some of which makes you say, “Duh, of course.”

For example, there’s no ­traditional L-shaped galley to port or starboard. There is, however, a tall and slender fridge smack in the middle of the boat (that you connect to the galley with a removable cutting board to complete the L). Walk on either side of it to get forward, past the proper nav station, the fold-down dinette table in the middle with roomy 6-foot berths on both sides, a jetliner-size head with a stowaway sink to starboard, and then a gigantic V-berth that benefits from all that volume in the bow. Back aft, under the cockpit, are large quarter berths as well that easily cruise-convert into storage space for water toys, like kites, wings and foils, all of which takes us back to survey result No. 2. This is where the post-race party begins and ends.

With the usual supply-chain delays, compounded with the build and design team’s obsessive and calculated approach to getting the Beneteau First 36 perfect at Hull No. 1, its debut got off to a later start than hoped. But with early boats landing at eager dealers worldwide, Plevnik says the goal is 32 boats per year for the next two years. The BOTY judges assure us it’ll be worth the wait and give you plenty of time to start planning what you can and will do with it.

• More: 2023 Boat of the Year , Beneteau , Boat of the Year , Print Winter 2023 , Sailboats
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Until 31 May 2024

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BENETEAU has been building sailing yachts and  motorboats  for all types of boating practices since 1884. Would you like to  buy a new boat ? Leisure boating, short trips, cruising, competitive sailing – whatever type of sailing you envisage, there is a boat to suit you at your local BENETEAU  boat dealer .

BENETEAU: A LONG STORY THAT BEGAN IN VENDÉE 

The story of BENETEAU began in 1884 in the shipyards of Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in Vendée, inspired by Benjamin Bénéteau.  At the time, BENETEAU had close ties with the fishing industry and, at the start of the 20th century, the brand launched its first sailing trawlers and motor tuna fishing boats. 

In the 1960s BENETEAU turned towards the building of recreational craft. In making this choice, BENETEAU actively focussed on  sailing yachts  and motorboats . 

In the 1990s, BENETEAU expanded becoming the umbrella brand of GROUPE BENETEAU. 

WIDE RANGE OF SAILING YACHTS AND MOTORBOATS 

Today, BENETEAU offers a wide range of sailing yachts, ranging from small boats, like the First 14, to big boats, such as the Oceanis Yacht 62, a large monohull as well suited to coastal cruising as she is to ocean navigation. The same is true of the motorboats, with lines of outboard and inboard motorboats for leisure boating, as well as big yachts ideal for cruising. 

This versatility contributed to BENETEAU’s international reputation as a brand, both in the water and at the major boat shows in Europe, the United States and Asia-Pacific. It also helped BENETEAU become a historical player in offshore racing, supplying three generations of one-design boats for the Solitaire Le Figaro single-handed race. BENETEAU also won renown with the First sailing yachts in well-known international races such as the Fastnet, the Sydney Hobart and the Middle Sea Race. 

MORE THAN A BOAT DEALER 

Our BENETEAU boat dealers are also present on international shores, so our after sales service can intervene worldwide. Thanks to our global network a BENETEAU boater can find the best possible assistance wherever he is boating. 

Buying a yacht, sailing yacht or a BENETEAU outboard motorboat is also a chance to join the brand’s community, with BENETEAU boat owner gatherings or rendez-vous, regattas, competitions, rallies, etc. 

You will have realized by now that BENETEAU offers you much more than buying a  new boat . It offers you a real boating experience and shares with you your passion for the sea.

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