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You can take the sailor out of racing, but you can’t take racing out of the sailor. So, when Nicolas Berenger, product and commercial director of Dufour Yachts, tells me that we might have to tuck in a reef as we head out for the afternoon on the new Dufour 41 on the Bahia de Palma in Mallorca, I’m not holding my breath.
Berenger’s résumé includes seven Figaros and multiple French national championship titles. And all morning, as we enjoyed a shifty breeze around 12-14 knots, I had watched how he kept asking hull No. 1 of Dufour’s new model to do little more. Making 7.6 knots of boat speed in 13 knots of wind with the full main and the 108% genoa, he looked at the true wind angle (TWA) of 64 degrees and politely took the helm to push her up to more like 50 TWA, where we maintained 6.3 knots with little effort in the sparkling, flat water. Another 5 degrees up and we were still making good 6 knots, and as the breeze puffed up another knot, we lifted up to 41 holding on to 6 knots.
He seemed satisfied, and even more so when we bore off, set the bright gold Elvstrøm asymmetrical chute, and rocketed at 9 knots in 12 knots of breeze back to La Lonja Marina for lunch.
But now it’s afternoon, a spirited sea breeze touching 20 has filled in, and I’m thinking about what Berenger had said earlier, that in 18 knots true, it might be time to reef—if he were cruising. He mentions it again after we extract ourselves from the dock where the breeze had us pinned (a bow thruster is optional, and I’d get one) and motor into the wind leaving the harbor—7.3 knots at 2,400 rpm on the 50-hp Volvo with a folding three-blade prop on a saildrive. But in the end—no surprise—it’s the full main that goes up on the deck-stepped, 56-foot Z Spars aluminum mast, and we charge off into what is now a short chop with some whitecaps…
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