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Getting underway was effortless. We simply tossed our lines, idled out of the slip, did a twin-screw pirouette to sidestep a cement barge (with an assist from a powerful, PTO-driven American Bow Thruster hydraulic bow thruster), and departed the port doing 5.3 knots while hardly ruffling the water. The sense of maneuvering playfulness engendered at the helm was immense, thanks to a set of huge, cast-urethane rudders, all-around visibility from the centerline steering station in the wheelhouse, plenty of raw horsepower, and Monk's straightforward, pilotboat-like running surface.
The average top end recorded while crisscrossing Puget Sound's Commencement Bay was 31.2 mph, a fine turn of speed. Cornering was tighter than I'd expected from an inboard (turning diameter at speed was maybe five or six boat lengths), and tracking was steady. And operating the boat was dead simple because, in accordance with Mann's wishes, there were no trim tabs to fool with. "Tabs add complexity and add weight," Mann opined as I swung us through a set of swooping S-turns, "and they're too often used to address balance problems."
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Certainly I detected none of this with the 57. To the contrary, running attitudes maxed out at 3.5 degrees, an optimum angle of attack for a high-speed planing vessel and attributable to the slight, stern lift-producing down-angle of Hagemann's tunnels as well as the sweetly balanced precision with which the longitudunal center of gravity was positioned via Nordlund's carefully controlled, time-tested resin-infusion methods. My only complaint? Forgoing the installation of tabs nixes the capability to adjust for crosswind-induced lists when running in open water.
Back at the dock, I scrutinized one final area: the engine room. Accessed via a watertight door secured with a big wheel and mounted flush with the cockpit sole, it was a thing of beauty. Duplex Racors and other ancillaries were secured to thick aluminum mounting plates, there were big Rexroth PTO units on both engines to energize the bow thruster and Trac stabilizers, a robust Reverso electric fuel pump promised fuel-filter changes without air-lock problems, and the obsessively labeled, schematic way everything was laid out made the whole place patently understandable.
"My kind of boat," I concluded as Mann and I finished up. And indeed, Nordlund's Xpress LT 57 is just the sort of vessel I tend to admire without reservation. A joy to operate, beautifully engineered, and reasonably swift thanks to modern, featherweight construction techniques.
For more information on Nordlund Boat Company, including contact information, click here.
SPOTLIGHT ON: Steering System
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Our boat's steering system functioned via a simple wheel-activated pump, much like those used on smaller vessels. The number of turns from lock to lock was roughly six, meaning some fairly serious spinning of the wheel was necessary to effect hard-over cornering. There's a virtue here, though. Six turns constitutes a rather happy medium, according to the engineering folks at Nordlund. Going with more turns means making the vessel a serious chore to steer by hand, with lots of cranking right and left. Going with fewer turns means making the vessel jumpy or over-sensitive to her helm. In either case, a slight reduction in tracking precision results due to a tendency to understeer in the former instance and oversteer in the latter. Sure, our 57 couldn't corner with the edgy agility of a speedboat that had just three or four turns lock to lock, but being a long-distance, straight-shot crusing vessel, she really doesn't need to. And frankly, I noticed that her middle-of-the-road six-turn setting was both forgiving enough and sensitive enough to allow a skipper to kick back in the helm chair and comfortably steer with his feet!—B.P.
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This article originally appeared in the April 2008
issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
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