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This the first mainland China import
we've reviewed, built by Jiang Hua in She Kau, PRC and imported
by Kong & Halvorsen under the Island Gypsy trade name. The
style of the boat is a flying bridge sedan, but it is built on
a modified trawler style hull. Defining my terms for you trawler
afficiandos, "trawler style" means that she has a deep,
full midsection with the rabbet line angling up toward the stern,
and a prominent keel. "Modified" because it does not
have the full depth of a true trawler. Our subject boat was exceptionally
well maintained.
Why someone would choose this
mismatched combination of hull and style is a bit beyond me, but
there it is. Fitted with a pair lf 3208 Caterpillars rated at
375 HP each for a total of 750 HP, it cannot make use of all that
power. More about that in a minute.
The general design and layout
of this boat is one that many people find very convenient. The
cockpit is moderately large and deep, with the bridge deck extending
full over it and capable of being enclosed with soft enclosures.
The bridge is very large with seating for 8 comfortably. The salon
is moderately sized with a galley up arrangement with lots of
windows, including a front windshield which, of course, makes
it difficult to air condition in the south even with sun screens
fitted. On a 92 degree day, the inside temperature wouldn't go
below 85 with two 12K BTU Cruisair units going full blast. There's
just a bit too much window glass for a southern boat.
Forward is a two stateroom layout
with single head and stall shower. The guest stateroom has upper/lower
berths with enough space to turn around in, although the bunks are
only 72" long. The single centered double berth in owner's
stateroom has access along the sides of the berth so that you don't
have to crawl on hands and knees, head first to get into bed. There's
a tangle of doors in the short companionway, but you have to put
up with that sort of thing in this size boat.
Overall, the egonometrics are
quite good and I had little trouble with bumping into or falling
over things. The traffic pattern is a straight line slightyly off
to the starboard side, so in an emergency you can go charging right
down the center isle unimpeded. That's a factor I consider critical
to good design. The lower helm station will appeal to a lot of northerners,
and so will the sliding door next to the helm. Keeping the water
out here is the only problem. Sliding doors tend to leak, and this
one did.
Unlike so many other oriental
imports, this boat has properly designed aluminum window frames,
and the lack of water damaged paneling around the windows proved
the point. Heavily anodized and not corroding. The sliding salon
door was the one sore point; the two doors are too narrow, had no
catches to stay in the open position (you had to use a hook) and
you have to open both to enter if you don't want to turn sideways.
The wood work inside is teak
veneers and solids for trim. The teak plywood is oriental,
very thin and grain checks badly when it gets wet. Its quality doesn't
appear all that good. The fit an finish is acceptable but not great.
The electrical system is well
designed and uses all American components except for the wire. The
wiring installation is very neat. There are two panels, one AC,
one DC, but the AC panel is located on the forward face of the lower
helm seat base with only 14" between it and the helm panel,
making it very difficult to reach this panel. Strictly a hands and
knees job. I will never understand why builders always put panels
down on the floor. The batteries are mounted in nice, covered fiberglass
boxes.
The engine room space is adequate
even with the iron fuel tanks there, and overall fairly neat and
uncluttered. Yes, the tanks are iron and mounted right in front
of the hull side engine room vents. Oops. We could not see what
was happening to the back side of them, but the rust trails pretty
much tell the story. Reaching the front and outboard sides of the
engines requires pulling the hatches up. The thru-hull valves were
all proper marine sea cocks, but then they botched it by brazing
90 degree elbows onto them and the strainers. The brazing is not
galvanically compatible, so you can guess the result . . . .corrosion
and leakage. Eventually they will break off. The exhaust system
uses very heavy exhaust hose, hydrolift fiberglass mufflers, but
unfortunately Chinese stainless steel elbows are attached to the
tops of the mufflers. You know the story there. The aluminum diamond
plate decking makes a wonderful impression on your hands and knees.
Ouch.
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Your basic Chinese stainless
steel. Metal fittings should never be encapsulated in fiberglass,
but the through hull fittings on this boat are. |
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In addition to a poor
planing angle, this boat throws a huge bow wave. If you want
to go fast, you need a planing, not trawler hull. |
The waste tank is stainless
steel. Yike! Kiss that goodbye. So were the water tanks, but get
this: they are soldered with LEAD and have screws holding the baffles!
Good luck with lead in your water tanks, folks. Might as well add
a little mercury, too.
The lazarette is huge and deep
enough to almost sit up straight. Everything is easy to get at,
but I do have a couple of complaints. First, there is a door in
the aft bulkhead, followed by the fact that the rudder installation
is not right. The distance between hull bottom and rudder carrier
is only about 8" and the shafts are 2" diameter. If you
hit something with the rudders, there is not enough support there
and they are going to tear through the bottom. You don't want 2"
shafts on the rudder; you want them to be small enough that they
will easily bend so they don't tear the bottom out. That brings
up the point about the door in the bulkhead. Wouldn't you prefer
that the bulkhead was water tight? I mean, if you tore one
of those rudders out, wouldn't you want the hull flooding
limited to one compartment? Me too.
The hull of this boat is well
framed and the decks seemed solid enough, although I couldn't find
out what the deck core was. The deck is glassed to the hull. As
usual with Chinese boats, there is excessive use of chopped strand
mat throughout the hull interior. You won't find a trace of woven
fabric anywhere, just mat. And the inside surface is as rough as
a cobb with those nasty little fishhooks sticking out all over.
The inside glass work is very sloppy.
If the interior glass work is
bad, the exterior glass work is atrocious. Less than 8 years old,
this boat has been painted more than once. The surfaces of the house
sides are like washboards, and blisters are popping up all over.
The hull sides aren't much better. Despite the faux plank seams,
bulkheads were standing proud and there were several flat spots
where the curved surfaces had dimpled. Much of this is the result
of a bad mold. But when the boat was lifted on a travel lift, the
slings noticeably compressed the hull sides.
If the inside of the hull is
loaded with mat, you can pretty much be sure that there are too
many layers of the stuff on the exterior too. In keeping with that,
this hull had blistered badly, and numerous attempts to stop the
blistering had failed miserably. Prick the bottom anywhere with
a sharp knife and fluid would run out. There was only one coat of
paint on it, so the latest repair work had been done only about
a year ago. Yet the bottom laminate seemed adequately thick and
we found no problems there. We've since seen two other IG40's in
boat yards, both of which also had horrendous blistering problems.
On one, chine extensions had been added to attempt to get the hull
to perform better. Apparently it didn't work because they were tanking
them off.
The performance of this boat
was the real sore spot. With 750 HP trying to drive a trawler style
hull up on plane, the steering was just plain freaky. She hit up
to 17 knots downwind, but would not track straight and the best
the autopilot could do was hold it +/- about 25 degrees in near
calm water at 2400 RPM. Manual steering wasn't much better; in nearly
calm water, the boat wandered all over the place and I had to work
the wheel hard. Putting it into even a gentle turn and she'd heel
way over . . . . to the outside of the turn, causing the
passengers to hang on for dear life. The handling ability was just
plain awful, and the small fiberglass rudders didn't help matters
any. The rudders are very thick (about 2") and heavily rounded
on the edges. Not only do they offer a great deal of resistance,
but are hydrodymanically wrong. In higher seas this boat is nearly
uncontrolable.
The boat has huge 48" trim
tabs but working them resulted in no change of speed, and not much
change in the angle of attack. The hull squats and pushes
a large bow wave, pointing up another reason why one shouldn't try
to push a trawler hull at planing speeds. The owner had been diddling
with propellers since the ones on the boat didn't match specified
size in the owner's manual.
Its hard to figure why a builder
would take basically a trawler hull and try to make a fast boat
out of it. But here you have it. Maybe they didn't know what would
happen Thing is, I know they have a couple of good naval architecture
schools in PRC. Maybe they didn't get to attend. Weren't members
of the Party. Something like that.
While one might be able to live
with the bad fiberglass work and a bottom that's errupting like
the bubonic plague, no one should put up with handling faults as
serious as this. Once again, all that sweetness of appearance and
a nice, low price that hides a world of hurt. No wonder there are
currently so many for sale on the market. We counted seven.
| These
are "reviews", not surveys, and bear no resemblance
to our survey reports.
We do not publish the results of the surveys that we perform.
Please note that the purpose of these reviews is educational,
to help you discern the differences in quality among boats generally.
They are not offered as a means to help you evaluate any particular
boat builder. We have no other reviews than those posted. |
Posted July 11, 1998
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