Fifty-foot flybridges are fascinating for many reasons. Firstly, 50ft is a size that is relatively easy to manage from a boat handling point of view. Two reasonably experienced people should be able to cope with berthing and running such a boat. Secondly, 50ft is a very handy size from an accessibility point of view. Most marinas, harbours and coves should be able to find space for a 50ft flybridge cruiser.
However, 50ft is also the size at which you start to get three good sized cabins and at least a couple of bathrooms. Some yards manage to squeeze the proverbial quart into a pint pot by shoehorning three cabins into a 45-footer but at 50ft no squeezing is required.
Here are four particularly good examples...
PRICE: £195,000
BOAT: Princess 55 DATE: 1987 LYING: Norfolk CONTACT: Norfolk Yacht Agency www.nya.co.uk
PRICE: £299,950
BOAT: Sealine T50 DATE: 2007 LYING: Falmouth CONTACT: Red Ensign www.red-ensign.com
PRICE: £299,950
BOAT: Fairline Phantom 50 DATE: 2008 LYING: Essex CONTACT: Boats.co.uk www.boats.co.uk
PRICE: £575,000
BOAT: Monte Carlo 5 DATE: 2014 LYING: Southampton CONTACT: Solent Motor Yachts www.solentmotoryachts.com
PRINCESS 55
BUILT 1987 P RICE£195,000
We’re cheating slightly with a 55ft boat but we couldn’t resist this one. It’s hard to believe that when the 55 launched in 1986, it was the pinnacle, not only of Princess’s range, but also of British boat building. Birchwood (remember them?) eclipsed it soon after with its 57, but the Princess 55 proved a very worthy flagship. Eight boats a year were planned but by the end of the first year of production, 12 had been built and orders stretched two years into the future.
While not as clever as modern boats (for example, there was little layering of the accommodation, where the lower deck extends back under the main deck), the sheer size of this one makes for masses of onboard space.
One of the most obvious upgrades over the Princess 45 (the previous flagship of the range) was the separate dinette area on the main deck. This boat has the three-cabin, two-heads layout, with the owner’s cabin forward, a bunk cabin to port and a larger double guest cabin to starboard (twin berths were standard). A rare option was to lose the bunk cabin in favour of an extended owner’s cabin. But the crew cabin on this boat has been swapped for a useful utility room.
The 1980s square-edged origami-styling looks classic rather than dated now. The bolt-on bathing platform, the lack of a transom door and the ladder to the flybridge are all very much of the era.
We tested the Princess 55 when new with a pair of 358hp Volvo Penta TAMD 71A engines and achieved 23 knots. This particular boat was re-engined in 2014 with a pair of FPT N67 450hp diesel engines which lifted the maximum speed to 26 kno
