USED BOAT: ENGLISH HARBOUR YACHTS 27 & 29
IN BUILD 2014-2018 PRICE RANGE £110,000 - £180,000
This attractive family cruiser is far more than just a pretty face — we find out why
You need to be prepared to spend plenty of time on the pontoons explaining what it is and accepting admiring comments from people who think it is the prettiest boat in the marina,” says Roger Webb, who kept an English Harbour 29 Offshore at Mylor Yacht Harbour for two years.
It’s easy to see why, it’s a very attractive boat. The brainchild of Adam Greenwood,
it, and its 27ft sibling, were the second models to come from the yard of English Harbour Yachts (the first was a cute little 16ft open dayboat).
English Harbour Yachts was formed by Greenwood in 2012, but this was by no means his first foray in the industry. Before striking out alone, he was the design director of Fairline Yachts – quite some pedigree for a fledgling boat builder!
The English Harbour 16 launched in 2013, and with production running smoothly from a former Fairline factory in Oundle (the first one was also bought by ex-fairline MD Derek Carter), the 27 followed a year later marking the company’s first move into cabin boats.
Launched at the Southampton Boat Show in 2014, it is a brilliant meld of design purity and genuine usability. The hull alone is a work of art, with its stainless steel vertical stem and complex convex aft topsides and transom. No portholes are allowed to mar the smoothly sculptured
topsides, windows are instead set into the superstructure. Even deck drains are routed aft and exit beneath the bathing platform out of sight. But step on board and you quickly realise that form is not at the expense of function. Side decks are so low and wide that no transom door is needed and side boarding even from a low pontoon is easy. Decks are 9in wide, and the deck fittings (cleats and fairleads) are raised out of toe stubbing way onto low bulwarks.
The cabin roof is flat enough to accept twin sun loungers with the moulding beneath the windscreen providing a natural forward-facing backrest. Lack of a transom door allows seating to run unbroken across the back of the cockpit and up both sides creating a sociable U around a table. Pass forward beneath the single stainless steel tube of arch (it locates canopies and nav lights) and you’ll find a wide single helm seat and a double seat for passengers alongside it. A locker beneath the cockpit sole stores six fenders vertically and another beneath the helm seat can take a liferaft.
Down below the attention to detail ratchets up another notch. The layout is conventional, a horseshoe of seating around a table forward that converts to a double berth, heads opposite the galley and a mid cabin aft. But again, check out the design and attention to detail. For a start, the boat’s wide beam is felt most keenly in here (at 10ft wide, it’s a full foot wider than a similar-length Orkney 27 Pilothouse for example), but so is the height. At launch there was over 6ft of headroom at the bottom of the companionway stairs. A full-length run of skylights in the coachroof throws lumens of light into the beach house-styled cabin with its bleached American light oak woodwork and louvred cupboard doors.
That beam allows space for further useful design features, like the ability to separate the shower and the toilet areas of the heads. Back aft, the mid cabin’s two single beds run longitudinally rather than athwartship and converting this to a double berth is simply a matter of extending the base and mattress from one side across to the other bed (it’s oversized, with part of it concealed behind the bulkhead when not in use).
POWER PLAY
Three engine options were offered on launch, all Volvo Penta and all Saildrive, meaning power is transmitted down a fixed leg through the hull almost directly beneath the engine with steering by conventional rudder.
Andrew Wolstenholme designed the semi-displacement hull with a keel deep enough to protect the Saildrive. It also makes for excellent low speed tracking. Technically there was also an electric power option, but although there was some uptake for electric EH16S, no one specified a battery
powered 27. With diesel the only alternative, 35hp, 55hp and 75hp engines were offered, the latter originally estimated to give speeds in the low to mid teens, although when the first boat was tested the vmax was pegged at about 9 knots. It was, however, perfect for inland use, something at which this model excelled.
“We bought ours after building a house on the River Thames,” says Wilson Phillips, who has owned his English Harbour 27 for three years. “We’d never owned a boat before but once the house was sorted it seemed a shame not to have a boat to go with it.” Wilson looked at the EH16 initially, but soon realised that the extra space of the 27 and the convenience of the cabin with all its facilities, would be a big advantage. “The quality, feel and clever design struck a chord with us. We use the boat for river trips with friends and occasional two or three day trips away and it’s been brilliant. It will accommodate eight of us for day trips, even if the weather isn’t great. We just leave the covers up, switch on the wipers and heating and go anyway. And when we stay on board it’s the details you notice, like great lighting and the fact that the shower is really powerful with plenty of hot water. It feels really well engineered – even over-engineered. Everyone told us that once we’d had our first boat for a little while we’d realise what we needed and change it, but I can’t see us parting with this one, it’s perfect for our needs”.
MOVING OFFSHORE
In 2015 English Harbour launched the 29 Offshore. Ostensibly the same boat with a bathing platform at the stern (hence the name change to 29 – although it was also an option on the 27), you need to look beneath the waterline to see the real differences. Although the hull is the same Andrew Wolstenholme semi-displacement design, a plug dropped into the keel section of the hull mould results in a much shorter keel for reduced drag and higher speeds. And providing those higher speeds is a switch to sterndrive propulsion and Volvo Penta D3 motive power. On offer were 140hp, 170hp, 200hp and 220hp engines, all fitted in an immaculately finished engine bay with superb access – the entire aft section of the cockpit, complete with seating, lifts via a button on the dash. In reality, almost all got the 200hp or 220hp engines, and when MBY tested the boat fitted with the former, we achieved almost 24 knots flat out.
But we also noticed that Mr Greenwood had been busy refining his flagship. The already generous headroom at the foot of the cabin steps had increased to a towering 6ft 5in and the cabin steps had been improved, which in turn freed up space in the mid cabin. In the cockpit, there was a little more foot space, the wheel was nearer the dash and the seat back
had been modified, all making life a little better for the skipper. Also on the options list was an open-sided hard top giving permanent shade and reducing the amount of canopy needed.
Roger Webb lives in the Midlands, but commuted regularly to his Mylor-based 29 Offshore, which he and his wife owned for three years. “We’d been out of boating for a while and then came back in with an outboard powered Jeanneau Merry Fisher. I was never completely happy with that boat, I found the ride hard and the build quality basic. So we went to Oundle and looked at the 29 Offshore. The quality was an obvious step up, but as well as being well built and practical, it was also just so lovely to look at.
We would stay on it for up to a fortnight at a time and ran the boat between Fowey in one direction and the Lizard in the other, normally cruising at about 15 knots. Being semi-displacement, it could be quite a wet boat although none of it seemed to reach us in the cockpit. However, it was a very confidence inspiring, it never slammed, even in conditions that would have had us gritting our teeth in the Jeanneau.” Roger’s only criticism was finding the mid cabin difficult to use in later years – “you need a degree of suppleness to get in and out” – eventually trading the boat for a Broom 35 Coupe with a large forward master cabin.
VERDICT
Coincidently, at the roughly same time English Harbour was also talking to Broom in Norfolk, but with very different intentions, and in early 2017 production of the entire English Harbour Yachts range moved from Oundle to Norfolk as Broom began building the boats for EHY under licence. Sadly, it was to be a short-lived arrangement. In March 2018 Broom announced plans to cease all boat building to ‘focus on the leisure side of the business’, and with that, and 16 of the EH27/29 models built, English Harbour production ceased.
Currently the business is seeking a collaboration with a new builder and it is hoped that the brilliant English Harbour
27 and 29 Offshore will sail the new boat sales market once more.
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