Topper Xenon on test

Toby Heppell sails the new Endeavour Trophy boat

Topper's new roto-moulded polyurethane boat, the Topper Xenon doublehanded has recently been selected as the boat for the Endeavour Trophy. With this event drawing ever closer TheDailySail took it for a test sail and spoke to Jon Manners, Topper International’s Sales Manager, about their new boat.

The first thing that you notice about the Xenon is how wide it is for such a small boat. You can see almost instantly that because of a cleverly designed step the hulls point of contact with the water is slim and the perception of this large width is caused by a dramatic flaring of the boat above the waterline. Also visually striking is the size of the rudder, which is very long for a boat of this size.

It is clear that Topper have designed this boat to be very forgiving for the slightly less experienced sailor. Jon Manners confirmed our guess: “The boat is very much aimed at the club racer market - the guy who is maybe coming back into sailing after having a family, for example. He wants a boat that he can go out and race, that has a good performance, but is the right size that he can put the family in and take them for a joyride.”

Many things with this boat work very well as a club racer and most of the ideas seem to have been designed so that they don’t interfere with the way the boat can be raced: The jib has a furler on it but - rather nicely - this is hidden away in a little bar behind the spinnaker chute making it totally flush. The mainsail also has zipped slab reefing as standard, enabling people to reduce sail area dramatically, but again this is as unobtrusive as any reefing system could really be. Another option is a foam float, which attaches to the top of the sail. “You can take that on and off - so if you are sailing with the kids then if you do capsize you have the extra security of more buoyancy at the top of the mast,” explains Manners.

After looking at the Topper Xenon on the shore for a while we decided that it was time to take her afloat. The weather was very light with almost no wind whatsoever on the river Hamble. On the water the boat is actually much quicker than you would expect her to be. This is because of the deceptively wide flare on the boat, making her ressemble an RS400 with National 12 sails whereas in reality she is a lot better proportioned than that.

The Xenon is also much lighter on the helm than you would expect it to be due to its very large rudder. This may well be somewhat of a double-edged sword. Because the blade is so large and the sails relatively small, the competitors at the Endeavour Trophy will want to keep steering to an absolute minimum so as to reduce the amount of drag created by this large blade. We found this was a particular problem gybing in light winds, as you tend to need to use a little more rudder one these occasions and it really does stop the boat. We should probably point out that the only time we found this to be a major issue was in some of the extremely light wind patches we came across, but in terms of racing it could make all the difference.

Before we went afloat, Manners had advised us: “we have found that in the lighter wind, getting the weight forward - dropping the nose and lifting the transom is important.” This becomes quickly noticeable as you start to sail the boat properly and the seat feels a little far back for the crew to sit on in these conditions. We would suggest them couching just in front of it: not comfy but probably quick. However this does raise a slight irritation that we had with the boat: When you tack or gybe, trying to stay as far forward as possible, the mainsheet jammer has a tendency to not spin around to the correct side so you have to give it a bit of a yank. Again this is not a huge deal and will only ever affect you in the super light winds we encountered but on many of our roll tacks we found it was inhibiting our ability to sheet on the main at the right moment. After our relatively short sail we were already beginning to get a bit annoyed with it.

The spinnaker system works well with a Spinlock fast action cleat for the halyard and the spinnaker pole in the manner that has now become standard in asymmetric boats. We really like the Spinlock halyard cleat and can’t see a reason why it is not on more boats. The spinnaker system did seem to have a little bit of friction in it, although we were confident this was because of a bit of a tangle somewhere on our test boat as opposed to there being some issue in the way the system has been put together.

In terms of controls everything is where you would want it to be with the kicker and the Cunningham controls led back to the helm, but also left reasonably accessible to the crew. Everything else is very much as tucked away as it can be leaving the boat very uncluttered and spacious; this effect is enhanced by the increasingly popular gnav instead of a kicking strap. The boat has clearly been designed to be as simple as possible with the basic premise of ‘if it does not really need a rope, don’t give it one’, leaving things like the centreboard to be pulled up or down directly as oppose to having a rope system for doing it.

The sails are all made by Hyde, consisting of a Mylar mainsail, Dacron jib and standard spinnaker - and seem to do their job very well, with the small spinnaker providing a fair amount of power for its size. Upwind the leach of the mainsail seemed to need quite a lot of work and we found ourselves adjusting the kicker a lot to keep all the tell tales flying. The jib upwind does not seem to close the slot very much at all and it would seem that there will be few problems with over sheeting here.

Typically polyurethane boats have received bad press due to their being bendy and heavy, but Topper are clearly working hard on changing this. The flexing of the boat is still a bit of an issue but there have been some attempts to reduce this. “The main beam, with the mast sat on it, is designed so that all the loads from the mast are taken to the outer skin of the boat. This reduces the boat flexing around the mast,” explains Manners. The weight issue has been totally remedied with the polyurethane boat now weighing 25kg less than the GRP prototype boat. As Manners explains: “the bigger you go with the plastic boats the lighter they get proportionally to glass boats, so this hull is now 118kg.”

There is no doubt that the Xenon is not really a boat designed for out and out racers to buy, but for the club sailing market it does seem to fit the bill. As the boat of choice for the Endeavour Trophy, we think it is largely on the button. One of the important things to remember is that because it is a club racing boat, people who will be in contention to win the Trophy are unlikely to have sailed one regularly and so no one have an unfair advantage. On the other hand because it is a club racer's boat it will never be as high performance or as ‘racey’ as previous Endeavour boats, however - and here is the important bit - few boats are suitable for this 'champion of champions' event.