When Groupe Beneteau’s Excess Catamarans introduced its first model in 2019, a test sail in winds approaching 40 knots made it abundantly clear that the 38-foot-7-inch Excess 12 wasn’t just another pretty new face in the ever-growing cat crowd. That boat could sail.

A recent light-air outing aboard the company’s newest model, the Excess 14, was perhaps equally revealing. With a hull length right around 44 feet and a beam of 25 feet, 9 inches, this is a big, roomy and comfortable cruising cat. But in just 5 knots of breeze, sailing with the main and working jib set, the chart plotter’s speed over ground read 4.1 knots heading upwind with the sails sheeted hard. A little later, with the jib rolled up and the code zero unfurled and set on a sprit that brings the boat’s LOA to 52 feet, 5 inches, our boatspeed was 5.7 knots on a reach in wind gusting to maybe 6. 

Those were conditions that would have left a lot of similar-size multihulls parked, but the Excess 14 felt relatively lively underway and “tacked quickly,” I wrote in my notes. I also noted that line handling was easy, thanks to sheet winches within reach of the helms and an electric Harken FlatWinder winch that handles a traveler mounted outboard of a comfortable bench seat that spans most of the transom.

For the record, I’m a fan of the Excess brand DNA that calls for outdoor helm stations located far aft on either stern. Sitting at them underway, you can see and hear the water rush by and feel the breeze in your face. You know, like when you’re sailing. You can converse with people seated in the cockpit, and you have easy access to the salon should you care to set the autopilot and keep watch out of the elements, through windows that provide nearly 360 degrees of visibility.

Open to fresh ideas, the team at Excess started with a blank slate when they conceived the 14, and they gave naval architects at VPLP Design some liberty in terms of hull design in their quest for better performance. VPLP, drawing from their experience with a long line of racing machines, then tested and ultimately opted for asymmetrical hulls—think of a monohull sliced lengthwise down the middle and then separated—that tend to reduce the size of the waves produced between the hulls, thereby reducing drag that slows down the boat.

The design team also toyed with replacing the stub keels affixed to most cruising cats, including earlier Excess models, with the sort of lifting daggerboards found on high-performance cats. They dropped that idea, however, because daggerboards add complexity when sailing and take away from living space below. Instead, the 14 has more-efficient, deeper and thinner fixed foils that increase draft to 4 feet, 10 inches—a few inches deeper than what you would expect to find on cats of a similar size.

There are also interesting ­innovations found in the 14’s interior, where saving weight has a direct relationship to livelier sailing. Relatively lighter carbon-fiber cloth is employed in some structural areas for strength, and some bulkheads are infused using foam coring. And there’s less wood used in furniture, drawers and stowage areas. Overhead, the cabin top is injected-molded, eliminating the need for a liner. And in hulls with two staterooms and two head compartments located amidships, the toilets share a single holding tank to reduce plumbing, while the staterooms share one larger Webasto air-conditioning unit, saving the weight and wiring required for two. 

Excess is also involved with Groupe Beneteau’s overall efforts to adopt more-sustainable building practices. Laminates used for the performance mainsail and genoa are recycled material, and hemp fibers are used in place of fiberglass and injected with partly bio-sourced resin in some nonstructural parts such as locker lids. Even furniture knobs have been replaced by neat little loops of rope.

Buyers have a few decisions to make when ordering an Excess 14. There is a four-­stateroom version that would be well-suited for charter, and there are a couple of three-stateroom options. In one, the owner gets a large fore-and-aft bunk aft, a sitting area with a desk at the foot of the companionway, a head and shower forward, and a walk-in closet in place of a V-berth. A second plan, called the Transformer Version, has bunks far forward that can be folded down for sleeping or up for stowage. (One company photo shows a paddleboard stashed away there.) That’s the layout we saw in Miami and the one I’d choose if it were my boat. In all the layouts, the salon gets lots of sunlight and has a pleasant, airy feeling with the sliding door and window open aft. There’s an abundance of fridge and freezer space adjacent to the galley to port. Dining tables are indoors, at the front of the salon, and in the cockpit. 

The Miami boat included a pair of optional 57 hp Yanmar diesels with saildrives (45 hp engines come standard) that pushed us along at 7.8 knots in cruising speed and 8.4 knots in get-home-quick mode. Gear included an electric winch at the starboard helm to make raising the main easier, as well as engine controls at either wheel to make docking simpler. Davits are available, as are canvas Biminis over the wheels for shade.

The boat also had an optional seating area on the flybridge. It reminded me a bit of a stretch version of the footwell that you’d find on a Sunfish. I’m not sure if it’s an option I’d choose, and with the boom set relatively low on the mast, it wouldn’t be a place to lounge underway. Some might like to sit up there while at anchor to enjoy the view though.

The sail-away price for the boat we visited is right around $980,000, but that’s loaded with gear, including an Onan generator and a Pulse rig and sail package that includes a 70-foot-8-inch mast instead of the standard 64-foot-11-inch spar. The upwind Pulse rig sail area of 1,453 square feet will be appreciated by those who sail in variable conditions and like to go fast; in the trades, the standard 1,323 square feet might suffice, and the shorter rig would let you just squeeze under most Intracoastal Waterway bridges.

Me? I was happy to have the added horsepower provided by the bigger square-top main. Sailing a big cat in 5 knots of breeze isn’t always fun, but aboard the Excess 14, we had a jolly old time.

Excess 14 Specifications

Sea Trial

The post Sailboat Review: Light and Lively Excess 14 appeared first on Cruising World.

When you test the fleet of new boats that are introduced every year—year in and year out, as we at Cruising World have been doing with our annual Boat of the Year contest for over two decades now—you begin to identify the shifting trends in boat design and construction as they inevitably occur. (Remember the total proliferation of “deck/saloon” layouts?) For 2021, as we put the dozen yachts that cleared the COVID-19 hurdles to become BOTY nominees through their paces, we began to sense some themes shared by many of the entrants that were unmistakable. It was beyond coincidental.

Superior sailing performance should always be a common denominator in any collection of solid, well-conceived sailboats, but for 2021, it seemed to be a higher priority than in previous years. Which is very cool. With that a given, what struck our judges even more strongly was the way in which space was allocated aboard the nominees, and moreover, that the designers and builders of monohulls and multihulls alike were seeking similar solutions: This is new because catamaran and monohull sailors have often striven—it seemed to us—to underscore their differences, not their similarities.

By the very nature of their form and utility, working spaces and social spaces on sailing craft have always been somewhat segregated. As they need to be. But what if there were a concerted effort to assimilate the two, where the designer strives to incorporate the saloon and/or cockpit with the helm stations and/or sailhandling areas? And so that there isn’t a delineated definition between the “sailors” and “passengers,” but rather integrated areas that make the entire experience more fun and rewarding for all?

We saw it again and again this year, on the luxury, million-dollar semicustom marvels like the HH 50 cat and the Hylas 60 monohull, as well as the pure production cruisers like the Beneteau Oceanis Yacht 54 and the Dufour 530.

But nowhere did we see space used in such a thoughtful, pleasant, workable, innovative manner than in a pair of new French catamarans: the 37-foot Excess 11 and the 45-foot Excess 15.

Which made us dig a bit deeper. And we suddenly realized that no single nominee did so many things as well as the simple little Excess 11. Certainly no other boats used space so effectively. Sure, the features might be more compact, but there’s a real nav ­station, a good galley, an expansive owner’s cabin, tramps forward, an effective cockpit…all the boxes are well-checked. Then there was the fact that, other than the Corsair 880 sportboat, no boat was less expensive. And while plenty of boats sailed as well as the 11—as one would expect on larger boats with longer waterlines—relatively speaking, none sailed any better.

Which is when it dawned on us: The Excess 11 was 2021′s Overall Boat of the Year.

Wow. What a surprise.

We’ll confess that when the Excess brand was launched just this past year, we didn’t totally get the concept. After all, the brand’s parent company, Groupe Beneteau, already had a well-established catamaran fleet in its stable: Lagoon. You need more cats? Really? Was Excess meant to be a bargain brand?

The answer is an emphatic no. The growing Excess line is a smart, well-reasoned entity on its own. And now it is beginning to make its mark.

It was perhaps telling that the broker who showed us the yacht, Mike Titgemeyer of Crusader Yacht Sales in Annapolis, also reps Jeanneau yachts. And he says that potential new-boat customers are looking at both lines. And why wouldn’t they? Both boats feature twin wheels (as did every other monohull in this year’s fleet, with the exception of the Island Packet 439…talk about trends), and a primary allure is pure sailing prowess. We’re guessing that the volume in a 40-odd-foot Jeanneau and an Excess 11 are keenly similar. After that it becomes a matter of taste (and, well, convenience—it’s easier to find a berth for a monohull than a cat). So are the days over when a boat buyer arrives at a boat show and looks exclusively at cats or monohulls, and never the twain shall meet? Well, Titgemeyer sure thinks so. And the Excess 11 is Exhibit A as to why this might be true. Which is what the Excess team tried to explain to us when they originally presented the brand. OK, guys, now we understand. It takes a while.

Judge Tim Murphy felt that the Excess met and exceeded several expectations: “This is the second-least-expensive boat in the whole contest, and I think that that’s really important. I think within the broad theme within the whole fleet—I’m not now separating monohulls and multihulls—is that delineation of working stations versus social stations for the outboard space. For example, on the Hylas 60, you have two different stations, but you need to step up and over a bridge deck to reach either. The Excess solves that problem better. You’ve got the eye contact. You’ve got the separation. You’ve got great communication between the two helms. And it’s very easy to move back and forth between the helms on the Excess, much easier than the big HH 50 cat, which is much more high-tech. So, I think broadly, on that whole big theme this year, which is how all these boats handle their working spaces and their social spaces, this Excess 11 does it best.”

Not to hammer it home, but with its deck-level steering stations, the Excess addresses—and rejects—another trend in cats in recent years: the raised helm, or the flybridge steering stations. These items were ubiquitous on Lagoons.

Judge Mark Pillsbury noted some other differences between the sister brands: “In their introductory remarks, the company representative started out by saying that with the Excess, they were going after a market segment that Lagoon had lost, which is basically people who still want to feel like they’re sailing. I’ve sailed enough Lagoons now to realize that they’re kind of like a Buick. You know, they’re solid, they’re dependable, they’re going to do 7 knots. They’re going to get you there. They’re not going to fall apart. They cross oceans; they go around the world. But you also generally put it on autopilot and go read a book. Whereas with the Excess, you really do feel the wind, you can hear the water, you’re in the elements. It’s a fun boat to sail. Really fun.”

We’ll conclude this ­winner’s wrap-up with one other thought on Lagoons versus Excesses. The Lagoon 380, which was discontinued a couple of years ago, was probably the most successful small cat ever, with hundreds and hundreds built in a production run that lasted forever. It showed the potential of what’s possible on a compact catamaran. Clearly there was demand for a boat of that size and capability. Surely there still is. It’s a portion of the market that might be totally underserved.

Of course, you can still find a good ol’ Lagoon 38. Or you can take the next step, aboard a new little big cat under 40 feet for a whole new generation of adventurous cruisers: the Excess 11. Come sailing, gang. Your boat is here.

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Mid-Atlantic area sailors will have their choice of one hull or two, and all from the same dealer if they’re in the market for a new sailboat from two of Groupe Beneteau’s product lines. Crusader Yacht Sales has just been announced as the region’s new distributor of Jeanneau sailboats and Excess Catamarans, a line introduced last year by the French boat builder.

Crusader owner Mike Titgemeyer said both brands are a good fit for his sales team, which has offices in Port Annapolis and Solomons Island. Crusader plans to have a number of models from both on display at next fall’s U.S. Sailboat Show, scheduled for Annapolis on Oct. 8 to 12.

“We are delighted to welcome Crusader Yacht Sales to the Jeanneau family,” said Nick Harvey, President of Jeanneau America. “Adding a partner like Crusader allows us to strengthen our footprint in the local market. We’re excited to continue growing the Jeanneau community in the Annapolis area.”

Fred Signat, director of Excess Catamarans in North America, notes that “Adding a strong partner like Crusader, established since 1982 allows us to expand our network on the East Coast.

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