Hanse 461, fast cruising pleasure

The Hanse 461 is a 46.5-footer from Hanse Marine designed by Judel/Vroijk and it is billed as a “performance cruiser”. It’s a beamy boat with an L/B of 3.18. In the fashion of today, the ends are short and the stern is very broad. The high freeboard works to give interior volume. The interiors were designed by Birgit Schnaase of Hamburg. In a nutshell, you can have either the two-stateroom layout or the three-stateroom layout done three different ways. The variations in the two stateroom layouts revolve around the head adjacent to the companionway and the configuration of the dinette. If you want two staterooms and a shower stall, the stall intrudes into the owner’s stateroom but allows direct access to the head from the stateroom. The dinette can be an L-shaped settee with additional chairs on centerline or you can have a drop-leaf table and a straight settee to starboard. In the three-stateroom layouts you can choose from two or three heads but there is no option for a shower stall. You can have your layout with two staterooms aft or forward. I’m not wild about any of these layouts. This size of boat with 14 feet, 7 inches of beam makes it hard for the designer to create a nice cozy saloon layout. The furniture opposite the dinette for all versions is used for the entertainment center. With the owner’s stateroom aft this stateroom is palatial, yet the designers have thoughtfully left volume aft of the stateroom for a lazarette. The cockpit is large and pretty typical of today’s aft-cockpit boats. The twin wheels allow clear access to the swim platform and are a great place to steer.

The Hanse 461 is highly-customizable

Sea Trial by “Cruising World“

It didn’t take long, that gray, blustery day last fall, for us to realize we had a greyhound by the tail. For a brief time after we’d raised the Hanse 461’s sails, the near-plumb-stemmed vessel wallowed unimpressively in the Chesapeake Bay cross chop. But as the full-battened main and self-tacking roller jib were trimmed, there was the distinct sense that the boat was being lifted onto a track–as though by hydrofoils, I recall thinking–and in 15 knots of true wind, the knotmeter shot up to 7.66. The connecting-rod steering of the twin wheels and the spade rudder felt balanced, smooth, and sensuous to the touch. Not for nothing had Cruising World nominated the German-built Hanse 461 to the Performance Cruisers Over 45 Feet division in the 2006 Boat of the Year competition.
The new model was designed by Judel/Vrolijk & Co., the principal architect of the Alinghi designs that won the 2003 America’s Cup as well as other recent Hanse models. Polar diagrams from the design office show that this boat will reach at 8.5 to 9.5 knots in 10 to 20 knots of wind. The Hanse 461’s displacement/ length ratio of 167 indicates a light-displacement form that will move through the water with a minimum of fuss, creating fewer and smaller waves with reduced hull resistance. Its sail area/displacement ratio of 22.56 explains the other key to its speed: It’s amply canvased in relation to its displacement and therefore easily driven in light air. Thus the Hanse 461, especially the shoal-draft version we sailed, is a good choice for Chesapeake Bay, while a deeper-draft version would be well-suited to areas where depth isn’t an issue. Either seems a likely candidate for racing as well as fast cruising