Performance cruiserr

From designers Umberto Felci and Patrick Roséo comes this new 34-footer built in France by Dufour. It's another cruiser-racer, a type we are seeing more frequently. This is a very nice looking boat. Like many in this category, its styling looks derivative of the early Nautor boats, with wedgelike cabintrunk profiles and low cockpit coamings.

The L/B of this design is a very beamy 3.02. This clearly puts this model in the cruiser-racer category and not the racer-cruiser category. Beam increases interior volume, and that's probably why we are seeing it on this design. The D/L from my estimated DWL of 31 feet is 148. You can have either a shoal-draft keel drawing 4 feet, 7 inches or the deeper keel drawing 5 feet, 11 inches. The deep keel is very shapely, but I'm not sure why it is this shape.

You can choose from two interiors. There is one model with mirror-image double quarterberth cabins and the head forward. The other layout has one double quarterberth cabin and the head aft. The head-aft version makes for a bigger forward stateroom and offers a reasonable sized lazaretto. You wouldn't call this boat roomy; after all it's only 34 feet, 5 inches LOA. The galley and nav areas are minimal.

But if you ignore the missing inches here and there this layout is very complete and should make for comfortable cruising. The wet locker immediately aft of the nav station appears to be 10 inches wide. Note that if you go with the head-forward model, the double V-berth has one side truncated to accommodate the volume of the head. So, if your wife is 6 feet, 3 inches tall I suspect this layout will not work.

Rigs have become so generic these days that it reminds me of the late 1960s when all we saw were masthead, single-spreader rigs with big foretriangles. Somehow I don't miss the old 180 percent genoas or those 15.5 SA/D ratios. The rig of today for either racing or cruising is a fractional rig with at least two spreaders, preferably swept, and a short, overlapping genoa. Mainsails have enough roach to them today to overlap the backstay. The bigger the mainsail in proportion to the overall size of the rig, the less importance you will have to place on jib selection. Ideally, all your sail reductions and depowering would be done with the mainsail and you would only use one size jib. You might carry jibs of different weights but the same size for varying wind speeds. With a furling boom and furling genoa this would be a very easy rig to handle. The SA/D is 17.8.

The deck is beautifully sculpted. The mainsheet traveler is right in front of the big wheel on the cockpit sole. There are coamings forward in the cockpit but they are cut down aft in the way of the wheel. There is a flush anchor well forward and a short swim step cut into the cockpit.

The hull is vacuum bagged with Kevlar, glass and PVC foam. The deck is "vacuum injected" for a claimed weight savings of 30 percent.