At first, I was going to hammer Beneteau for introducing a model (the Beneteau First 36 Spirit) that is just a gussied up version of an existing model, but what the hell was I thinking? EVERY car company in the world does their own version of this, and J/Boats are the industry leaders in making versions of many of their many models.
However, since most sailboat builders make the cockpit benches too short, we do like the added and removable “bench extenders”. Every boat that suffers from short benches should come with these.
It’s called marketing (duh), almost always backed up with research that justifies introducing such things. Consumers almost always want the “latest and greatest”, whether it is new or “reengineered”, and here Beneteau is offering the latter.
As an aside, can they take the god damn “stand alone fridge island“, the first thing to run into when coming below on all their models?? So ridiculous.
To me, there is only one Beneteau First 36 to get and that is the SE model(which curriously is no longer listed on their website), but to each his own, and it will be interesting to see how many of these fully loaded $500,000 dollar 36′ boats they sell…
