FIRST TEST ELAN E4

Elan’s smallest boat is a huge amount of fun, but would she make a sensible cruising boat? Theo Stocker set out to find her limits

- Theo Stocker

There are boats on which you want to play it safe, reef early and hunker down. The Elan E4 is not one of them; this is a boat that makes you want to get stuck in and enjoy some proper, fun sailing. The solid Force 5 gusting 6 that was pushing a lumpy sea into the Easter Solent off Portsmouth only added to the sense of anticipation as we set out for our test, and lines were rigged for the whopping asymmetric spinnaker.

I had in mind that I really wanted to see what this boat could do, having heard much about her predecessor, the Elan 360, of which is she is a very slight update, and reuses the same Humphreys- designed hull of the original Elan 350 from 2012. While the 360 was not perfect, it is a boat that one sailing friend tells me was ‘pretty much my dream boat’. The E4 itself has been around since 2018, but as we still hadn’t tested it, I thought I better get on one to find out if she really was as good as all that.