The Elan 340 comfort and performance.
The Elan 340 from Elan Yachts is a performance cruiser that provides comfortable cruising while being a competent performance sail boat racing around the cans or in longer passage races.
The Rob Humphries designed the this Elan to be responsive in light air and controllable in heavier air, our experience is that she has a sweet spot between 6 to 10 knots but with the correct sail selection is still happy to over 30 knots a wind speed that is approaching the limit of our comfort zone.
If you explore this site you may come across pages detailing our race results, while most of the racing we do is club racing where our G-whizz is regularly pitted against larger boats. In the Greenwich Flying Squadron twilight series we are in a division where G-whizz is the smallest boat competing against the likes of Elan 37, Jeanneau 39i, Northshore 38, Hanse 370, Dehler 38 etc. It is a credit to her design of that she regularly places towards the front of the field, unfortunately her performance also means that she also carries one of the higher PHS handicaps, we tend to look at our scratch results (as opposed to the handicap results) to gauge our performance, a good handicap result is worth a celebration though as it is also the result that rewards us with a bottle of wine at the awards apres racing.
Elan Yachts are not a well known brand in Australia and the Elan 340 is a fairly rare boat, we believe that there are only two or three others on Australia. It is a compliment to Elan yachts that when people first see G-whizz they are taken by her modern looks and are surprised to hear that she was launched in 2007. When we have her on the pontoon at the Club many people like to check her out, they are surprised that (knowing her relative speed) they see a boat that is fully kitted out for cruising right down to the cooking implements and not a gutted out race boat, many also comment the Elan 340 looks bigger than she is.
Hopefully the links on this page will give some idea about what the this Elan 340 is all about. The brochure implies Elan 340 comfort and performance, we can attest to that.
