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I pulled the curtain
back and peered out. If ever there were a day to stay in my room at the
Mansion House and read British yachting magazines, this was it. Christmastime
in Dorset, England. And cold. Two floors down, people scurried past on
the streets of Poole wearing woolen coats, scarves, mittens, and the stolid,
stiff-upper-lip looks of British citizens dealing with adversity. I checked
my watch. It was 7 a.m. Time to head over to the Sunseeker facility on
Poole Harbor and see about test driving its latest creation.
On arriving at the marina,
I was met by young Matt Higham, Sunseeker’s boat test honcho, who
seemed to be having just a little trouble getting into the cockpit of
one of the wildest looking speedsters I’d ever seen in my life—the
39-foot Sunseeker XS 2000.
“Broke me knee,
I did, doing motocross,” he offered. “I’m into such things
as goin’ fast.”
While pondering that,
I walked up and down studying the boat from the dock while Matt raised
the engine hatch. Hmm. The squarish bow was strikingly unusual, a state
of affairs undoubtedly attributable to Sunseeker’s partnership on
the XS project with Italian boat racer, designer, and engineer Fabio Buzzi.
The reason for the snub-nosed look lay just below the edge of the deck:
a set of dramatically flared, molded bulges on either side of a fiercely
raked stem. They’re Buzzi’s way of adding buoyancy to cut the
chance of stuffing the nose into a wave at high speed.
The on-deck layout is
extraordinary as well. Between the forward anchor locker and the cockpit
is a nearly full-beam fiberglass hatch riding on gleaming stainless steel
tracks. Matt explained that after the finishing touches would be put on
our prototype over the next few weeks, the hatch would ultimately slide
forward via electric actuators to reveal a small “forward cockpit,”
with opposed benchseats, as well as a cuddy fully forward containing a
Porta Potti and berth. Of course, with the area not even roughed out,
I couldn’t form an opinion as to its practicality, but versus the
airless, squat, tubular interiors I see in most performance boats these
days, the idea of a convertible-type open-air lounge area on deck seemed
like a good one.
The cockpit arrangement
is spare and business-like. I liked the matte-black centerline steering
console, the contrasting, white Gaffrig throttles and shifts, and the
carbon-fiber wheel with mahogany inserts. Just over the top of the latter
component is an impressive array of Gaffrig II gauges with hooded, brushed-aluminum
bezels and a big, easy-to-read tab indicator. A Simrad VHF and a Northstar
951XD GPS/plotter were flush-mounted in the molded dash, above and to
the left of the Gaffrig sticks. One especially interesting control component
I missed at first glance was a small but significant toggle all the way
to starboard, just under the wheel–the switch for the dual-speed
ZF/Hurth HSW 110 GT transmissions Sunseeker offers as an option on the
XS.
I climbed into the cockpit
and watched as Matt checked the oil in the twin 420-hp Yanmar diesels
that were snugly ensconced in the XS’s gelcoated machinery spaces.
A couple of things were different here, too. First, both exhaust headers
are routed through the bottom of the boat to exit just forward of the
props, a particular feature of the Trimax system. Along with hoses from
on-deck air intakes, they induce slip at low speeds so the engines can
gain rpm and horsepower more quickly. The second unusual feature is the
special “bustle” molded into the after sections of the boat.
Another of the characteristics of the Trimax system is the need for a
false or secondary transom to accommodate a drive configuration that includes
large, long trim tabs as well as rudders (see diagram on page 61).
“Not much in this
engine room but engines, mate,” grinned Matt, wiping a dipstick approvingly
on the arm of an insulated jumpsuit. Except for wraparound sound insulation,
batteries concealed in fiberglass boxes on either side of the engines
with vent hoses terminating on deck, and trim tab rams mounted inside
the 39-footer’s hull to protect them from saltwater corrosion, he
was right.
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Sunseeker XS 2000 continued > Page 1, 2,
3, 4, 5
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