Leopard Catamarans

Leopard is a badge, not a yard. The boats are built in Cape Town by Robertson & Caine, founded in 1991 by John Robertson and Jerry Caine, and the same hulls leave that factory wearing three names: Leopard for private buyers, and Moorings and Sunsail for the two largest charter operators in the world, who have been the yard's principal customer since 1995 and have taken more than three thousand boats. Around two hundred catamarans a year come out of a plant that is South Africa's largest boatbuilder, and the founders sold the company in 2023 to PPF, a Czech investment group, which is a change of owner rather than a change of method. The method is the house style, and it explains almost every detail on the boat: design for a fleet operator first, and the private buyer gets the same boat with a different interior. A hardtop over the cockpit instead of canvas, because canvas is a recurring bill on a fleet. A forward cockpit reached through a watertight door in the front of the saloon — introduced on the Morrelli & Melvin Leopard 44 and carried across the range since. Layouts counted in cabins, where the four-cabin boat is the charter one and the three-cabin boat with an owner's hull is what a private buyer orders. Even the drawing office follows the customer: Simonis Voogd early, Morrelli & Melvin from 2004, then Simonis Voogd again from 2014.

The middle era is the one most likely to be in front of a used buyer today. The Leopard 40 that Morrelli & Melvin drew in 2004 came out four thousand pounds lighter than the Leopard 38 it replaced, with vacuum-bagged balsa core, fine bows and about three feet of bridgedeck clearance, and it took Cruising World's best multihull under forty feet and best overall import in 2005. A hundred and thirty-six were built before the model changed hands and designers again in 2014. Which generation you are looking at decides what the survey is looking for:

Scout watches 85 live Leopard askings, averaging $431,977; the hulls complete enough for us to publish cover 1 of their models, asking $199,900 (2006). Read that market differently from any other builder's. Leopards do not trickle onto the brokerage one owner at a time — they arrive in waves, when charter terms end and a fleet phases boats out together, so a Leopard's asking price is set as much by which release its hull belongs to as by the person selling it. A buyer who is patient rather than opportunistic is usually buying against a schedule, and the schedule is knowable.

Which makes the honest notes about charter service rather than about the boat, and the evidence there points both ways at once. Brokers quoted in Yachting World's guide to buying ex-charter argue that heavy use is a form of proof — the systems all work because they were all used, the servicing ran to a company schedule rather than an owner's enthusiasm, and a phase-out period prepares the boat for sale before it is listed. The same article carries the warning: we have seen supposedly surveyed yachts with undeclared hurricane damage, evidence of hard grounding, and all manner of major undeclared faults, and there is simply a greater chance that a charter yacht was grounded and nobody wrote it down. Both are true of the same fleet, and together they say exactly what to do — haul the boat, read the keels, rudders and saildrives for what a grounding leaves behind, and set the fleet's own maintenance record against what you find rather than instead of it. Sails, canvas, upholstery and the dinghy are consumed by five years of charter and should be priced as replacements, not inspected as assets.

The build itself draws a narrower complaint, and it is about fitting rather than engineering. The longest-running owner thread on these boats is a catalogue of leaks — hatches and windows weeping, a saloon door jumping its track, hardtop bimini bolts placed where no one can reach them — and the thread's own conclusion is that the hatches were fine and their installation was not, down to flanges that were never levelled and fasteners that were not fitted as the maker specified. Other owners in the same threads answer that this is quality control and not design, and point out that the structural failures making news elsewhere in the industry are of an entirely different order. Read as priorities, it is consistent with everything else about the yard: boats assembled at fleet cadence by hand vary in their bedding and their fittings rather than in their laminate, which is why two hulls off the same line survey differently. On the balsa-cored boats that variance has somewhere to go — rot and delamination are reported as possible where water has been getting in, and moisture ingress is described as common in ex-charter hulls, so this is a survey with a moisture meter or it is not a survey. Buyers of the current generation add a design note to the list: the forward door and seating that define the modern boat are a hole in the front of the saloon, and the raised helm that comes with them lifts the boom and costs mainsail area.

Buy one to get the most usable catamaran per dollar anywhere in the Caribbean, with a service network, a parts pipeline and a fleet of identical sisters to price against — and to treat charter history as documentation rather than as a stigma. Look elsewhere if you want a boat specified to your own taste, since these are built to a fleet's order book, or if you want performance under sail as the first priority. The French volume yard that sells to the same fleets, and to private owners in larger numbers, is Fountaine Pajot; the boats big enough to have worked for a living are gathered on the charter-size shelf, and the wider two-hulled fleet on the catamaran shelf.