BENETEAU SWIFT TRAWLER 54

Alex Smith heads to France's Beneteau HQ for a UK exclusive on what might just be the best Swift Trawler yet

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Saint-Gilles-Croix-deVie might seem like an unassuming little town for a boatbuilder of Beneteau's stature, but as you cast your eye over the river, the clues are there. Whether for commerce or pleasure, every boat seems to come with a sheltered pilothouse and a big aft deck, full of flags, floats, lines and buoys. It's clearly a hotbed for sea fishing and yet in spite of the town's reputation for some of France's most delicious sardines, it's not actually a fishing boat we've come to see. We're here to see a boat Beneteau describes as a high-volume, long-distance cruiser built for weeks, rather than merely weekends, away - a boat so new that, to this point, it has been witnessed by just one other member of the world's press.

It's known as the Swift Trawler 54 and as it dozes in the sun, its flared 'block-out-the-sun' flybridge perched on a vertical structure dwarfing the boats that surround it, what's particularly striking is that it looks pretty much like every other Swift Trawler we've seen - and that's at once a surprise and an inevitability.

After all, there's a slightly superyacht-inspired aesthetic to the larger Grand Trawler 62, with its staggered ranks of angular hull windows, that looks very cool. You might have anticipated the next largest model in the range inheriting a little bit of that. But at the same time, changing the template too radically after 21 years and more than 1,800 boats is a dangerous game.

Beneteau is keen to retain its Swift Trawler identity and to cater for the tastes of existing Swift Trawler customers. Conservative though it might be, the simple workmanlike modesty of the new 54 is likely to achieve exactly that.

INTIMACY BEFORE OPENNESS