2003 Beneteau Oceanis Clipper 39339ft

This 12 meters is concentrated cruising. Fast and easy to handle, she is an invitation to blue water cruising. This is the 3 stateroom model.

First and foremost, the 393 is roomy. You can’t help but notice the legroom, elbow room, generous seat backs, and open space in the cockpit. The walk-through coaming aft creates a good combination of openness and security. While the well is a bit too wide to brace across it’s hard to find any other quibble- sight lines are good, protection is stout, surfaces are contoured for comfort, and space is carved out around the winches to let you work them efficiently. It’s a big, comfortable, efficient, livable, modern cockpit. 

She’s also roomy below. Headroom in the after part of the saloon approaches 6′ 6″. Light adds to the open feel, thanks mostly to the three overhead deck-windows (which come with sunshades).

There are two different interior configurations., This boat is the three cabin version that offers two quarter cabins aft. The tri-cabin set-up puts the galley in place of another settee in a linear arrangement with an array of finished cabinets and drawer stowage. It also has a dedicated nav station where the two-cabin version has none. 

Beneteau has always done a good job with interior wood. Far from seeming “knocked off” or mass produced, the furniture, cabinetry, and trim of the 393 live up to custom standards of fit, precision, and harmony. That’s because the company has purchased wood widely (and wisely) and because its wood shop is a two-acre masterpiece of computer controlled milling, routing, spraying, and fitting. Aside from the somewhat unsettling impression of living inside a grand piano instead of a boat, the result is impeccable.

The 393 offers a great deal of light and air. The decklights are the biggest light source, but the boat has six house ports, six hull ports, and seven overhead hatches, plus two cockpit ports. There’s plenty of cross ventilation to make forecabins and quartercabins habitable.

The 393’s nav station (in the three cabin layout) is big and well-designed for comfort. A cruising sailor still needs a desk, even if its just a surface for a notebook computer.

Beneteau has been building boats of solid glass reinforced with a fiberglass structural grid for at least 20 years. The method has been refined in light of material changes and streamlined in places for better efficiencies, but it remains essentially the same process.

These boats are clearly and cleverly “designed to be built,” using the minimum possible time and labor. In a production process this big and efficient, those can be considered good qualities. 

While lead is the ballast of choice throughout most of the industry, Beneteau generally uses cast iron, as they do on this boat. Lead is denser by far than iron, and so will make for a much heavier keel in the same area and volume (or can be smaller to achieve similar weight). Lead, however, will also cost almost twice as much.

While economy may be Beneteau’s main reason for using iron keels, Burdick points to another advantage: “The keel root [where fin meets hull] is a significant source of turbulence. You reduce that drag by making the foil as thin as possible at that point. That’s much easier to do with cast iron.”

Like the iron-keeled Oceanis line that have come before, the 393 depends less on ballast (at a minimal ballast/displacement ratio of 31 percent) than on shape (with a substantial 13′ 1″ beam) for stability. Were she to sport a similarly sized fin made of lead, it would lower hercenter of gravity (a positive move in terms of stability), but it would make her an appreciably heavier, costlier boat, with a “dead weight” liability to overcome in her performance. In addition, to pare down the size of her keel by using lead, it would diminish lateral plane and hurt upwind performance.

Her mast is deck-stepped. Here, we believe, the company probably listened too closely to people who said they didn’t want a hole in the roof and a tree trunk in the saloon. The interior compression post is pretty, and the weldment at the top that accepts though-bolts to fasten on deck hardware is clever-but we think a boat this size should have a keel-stepped mast. As it is, the rig requires a babystay to help it stay in column.

Beneath the grid the keel is affixed (sealant and machined-in bolts) in a leakproof but removable bond.