Excess 15 Catamaran, Specs, Prices and Used Buyer's Guide

Where the Excess 15 sits in the Excess story

The Excess 15 was the larger of the two catamarans Groupe Beneteau used to launch its Excess brand at boot Dusseldorf, alongside the Excess 12. Both were deliberately sportier reinterpretations of existing Lagoons: the 12 came from the Lagoon 40 and the 15 from the Lagoon 50. The idea was to win back sailors who felt Lagoon had stopped catering to people who enjoy trimming sails, and the 15 delivered on that brief well enough to be voted Multihull of the Year at the 2019 British Yachting Awards by readers of Sailing Today and Yachts & Yachting.

Today the Excess 15 appears under Excess Origins on the builder's site, a label for its first-generation boats, and the clean-sheet Excess 14 has taken its place at the top of the range. That makes the 15 a used-market proposition, and an interesting one: a 48 foot cat with sport-cruiser handling and Lagoon 50 volume underneath.

A Lagoon 50 put on a diet

SAIL explains the construction in detail. The Excess 15 is built in three vacuum-infused sections with balsa coring in the deck and above the waterline. It shares the Lagoon 50's bridgedeck and the inner halves of the hulls below the waterline, but uses new outer hull halves. VPLP and the Excess team took about a ton out of the Lagoon by lightening interior fixtures and deleting the flybridge, and Excess committed to never building a flybridge model.

The numbers that result are 48 feet 5 inches overall, 46 feet 11 inches on the hull, 26 feet 4 inches of beam and 4 feet 7 inches of draft, with a light displacement of 19.05 tonnes (42,018 pounds). SAIL calculated a sail area to displacement ratio of 22 and a displacement to length ratio of 182, which puts it on the lively side of big cruising cats rather than among the heavy charter boxes.

• LOA 48 ft 5 in (14.76 m), hull 46 ft 11 in (14.31 m), beam 26 ft 4 in (8.03 m)
• Draft 4 ft 7 in (1.40 m), light displacement 42,018 lb
• Fuel 2 x 520 L (about 275 US gal); water 2 x 240 L plus optional 2 x 175 L
• Mast height 91 ft 6 in above the waterline on the builder sheet
• CE category A for 14 people

Standard rig versus Pulse: the option that defines resale

Standard sails were a 104.5 square meter (1,124 sq ft) square-top main and a 55 square meter (592 sq ft) self-tacking jib, 159.5 square meters (1,716 sq ft) upwind. The Pulse Line package added a taller mast, about 3 feet more according to Cruising World, a bowsprit and a 117 square meter Code 0 on a continuous-line furler, lifting upwind area to 171.6 square meters (1,846 sq ft).

Both magazine testers sailed Pulse boats and both would buy that version. With a self-tacker for upwind work and a big furling reacher for everything else, the 15 is easy for two people despite its size. The tall rig, however, means fixed bridges are out of the question, so East Coast owners will be taking the outside route between harbors.

Two Fort Lauderdale test sails, two happy testers

SAIL tested off Fort Lauderdale in 12 to 18 knots of wind and a 3 foot chop. Under main and jib the boat made around 8 knots within 60 degrees of the true wind, and with the Code 0 on a broad reach it peaked at 10.5 knots. Cruising World's Boat of the Year crew saw high 7s upwind in 10 to 12 knots, lost about a knot bearing away under jib, then jumped to 10 and change when the reacher was unrolled.

Under power, SAIL's boat had the optional 80 hp Yanmars in place of the standard 57s and folding props, making 7.5 knots flat out and about 6.5 knots at cruise. Conditions were too mild to judge bridgedeck slamming, so a sea trial in a real head sea is worth arranging before you buy.

Twin helms on the transoms, with real shade

Each hull ends in a helm pod with a folding double seat. On the test boat the starboard pod carried the Raymarine display and engine controls, and the port side wind instruments and a tablet mount; duplicate engine controls were optional and SAIL thought them a worthwhile investment for docking. Small hard biminis over each helm give shade and rain cover without cluttering the profile.

Excess claimed that vertical saloon windows solved the classic aft-helm problem of not seeing the bows, and SAIL agreed that you can see right through the saloon to both bow tips. Cruising World liked how the aft wheels keep the helmsman in conversation range of the cockpit rather than isolated on a flybridge.

Owner's version, four cabins or a six-cabin charter boat

The owner's layout gives the whole starboard hull to a master suite with a desk, an outboard sofa and a large forward bathroom with twin sinks, with two en-suite guest cabins to port. The four-cabin version has four en-suite cabins, and a six-cabin, six-head version plus forepeak crew berths was offered for charter operators. Check which layout you are viewing, because charter boats carry very different wear and resale value.

The saloon is lighter and more modern than the Lagoon 50's, with an L-shaped settee slightly raised to see out, a bench facing it and a galley in the aft port corner. SAIL's main interior gripe was a lack of overhead hatches, which can make the saloon warm in the tropics. Outside, a forward cockpit lounge and an aft cockpit with an accordion sunroof give two good places to sit at anchor.

The Torqeedo hybrid prototype

Excess used the 15 as its first hybrid test bed. Through its Excess Lab program the brand showed an Excess 15 with Torqeedo Deep Blue Hybrid propulsion at the Cannes Yachting Festival, using two 50 kW electric motors with ZF technology and two large BMW i3 lithium batteries. The builder reported that hydrogeneration under sail supplied all onboard equipment at a 7 to 8 knot cruising speed.

This was a showcase rather than a common production option, so almost every used Excess 15 you will find has conventional twin Yanmar diesels. If you do find the hybrid boat, treat battery condition and system support as the key questions.

Buying an Excess 15 secondhand

When new, Cruising World put the US base price at $737,000, with a heavily optioned boat at about $950,000, and SAIL's Pulse test boat was priced at $1.1 million. Production was short, so the market is thin; we expect most boats to trade between about $580,000 and $850,000 depending on layout, rig and equipment. Owner's versions with the Pulse rig and 80 hp engines command the premium.

Running costs resemble any 48 foot catamaran: a wide slip for 26 feet 4 inches of beam, twin saildrive service, a big rig to maintain and sails that are expensive to replace. Budget $40,000 to $75,000 a year. The upside of the Lagoon 50 connection is that many structural and hardware parts are shared with a large, well-supported fleet.