Not surprisingly, one of the big draws at this year’s U.S. Sailboat Show in Annapolis has been the new Garcia Exploration 45, developed by French builder Garcia Yachts in cooperation with bluewater sailing guru, author, and ARC founder Jimmy Cornell. I’m a big fan of Garcia, which has been building boats for 40 years now, both because they build in aluminum and because they do it exceedingly well. In the last several years most of their boats have been large stratoshperic custom jobs, well beyond the reach of mere mortals with less than a couple of million to spend, so it’s heartening to see them again building something a bit more accessible.
Jimmy and I have some history, as I first met him crewing around in his America 500 cruising rally way back in 1992, so he was happy to show me around the boat this past Thursday shortly after the show opened. After retiring from the rally racket some years ago, he took to roaming the planet in aluminum centerboard Alubats and spent some time cruising in high latitudes. So he had some pretty specific ideas about what he wanted when he approached Garcia about building his next boat.
Jimmy holds forth on the stern of his latest Aventura. Like its predecessors, this is a boat with an integral centerboard and lots of internal ballast stashed in the bilges. Jimmy likes centerboard boats for sailing in very strong conditions, as he says they’ll skid away from breaking seas when the board is pulled up
Jimmy wanted a boat for cruising both in high latitudes and in the tropics so specified a deck saloon layout with lots of windows affording a catamaran-style wrap-around view of the world. He claims this is the first true deck-saloon centerboard boat ever built. You can steer the boat by wire from the comfy nav station there, where there’s also a throttle control for the engine, so you can run things from inside when you want. On the left down there you can see two of the four single bunk berths on the boat, which is what Jimmy favors for sleeping offshore. There are also two double staterooms, so the boat can sleep eight people total
The galley is straightforward and fairly simple, laid out to port alongside the saloon
A nice high-latitude feature–a pair of super-long stern lines stored on reels inside a dedicated transom locker
People I talked to either loved or hated the overhanging hard-dodger coachroof. You can count me in the former group. To achieve the complex shape, the coachroof is a molded composite structure, the only bit of the boat that isn’t aluminum. There’s also a very bulletproof companionway door
Source: http://www.sailfeed.com/2014/10/2014-annapolis-boat-show-jimmys-new-boat-2/