There is eye watering, grin fixing, backside twitchingly quick, where your ride is balanced on a knife edge, and there’s clocking the same numbers without the same jittery feel. Here, the boat knows where to go and encourages you to follow by gradually loading the helm as if starting a friendly arm wrestle. Push her too far and you’ll still end up on your ear, but at least you had plenty of warning.

Developing such balance between performance and handling has been a tough nut to crack. How do you produce slender, high lift foils with minimal drag without creating a lifting surface that operates like the flick of a switch? Such binary hydrodynamic behaviour has taxed modern yacht designers for years, but the lessons learned aboard the big boys’ toys such as VOR70s, mini maxis and TP52s among others have been filtering down into the smaller size ranges.

And then there’s the issue of deck layouts and control line systems. Again, the big guns have led the way with innovative details and devices to help crews change gear from the weather rail as they hike over the guard wires like soggy washing.

But not everything that has filtered down has been appropriate. Just as the complexity and power of a modern F1 race car makes it impossible to pull away without stalling for anyone other than a seasoned race driver, so not all of the high technology aboard professionally run grand prix machines works for the rest of us.

The bottom line is that striking the balance is the key. And that’s where the new mark Mills designed C&C 30 stands out in the new breed of thirty something foot race boats.

This is a design that takes the best bits of modern high performance and wraps them in a deck layout that will look and feel familiar to a wide range of crews while launching them onto a new level of performance.

Throughout the boat it is clear to see that the strategy has been to employ technology where it makes a difference while keeping things simple elsewhere. The best example here is the Hall Spar carbon mast supported by 1×19 Dyform wire rigging with ordinary T-terminals on the top and open bodied bottle screws at the bottom. But there are plenty of other examples from the simple hanks on the headsails to transverse genoa tracks and control lines that are fitted and run above decks with conventional rope tidy bags for their tails. Even when lines do need to go under the deck to prevent crew from standing on them at crucial times, they do so through recessed channels in the deck which are covered by easily removable lids.

For the full feature see June 15 issue of YW