Nautitech Catamarans

Every cruising catamaran yard has to answer one question before it draws anything else — where does the person steering stand — and Nautitech has given the same answer since its first boats: two wheels aft, one in each quarter, at cockpit level, with short direct linkages to the rudders. Nothing about that is a styling choice. No flybridge means the coachroof stays low, which keeps the boom low, which is mainsail area that a raised helm station would have taken away; it keeps weight and windage down and the centre of gravity with them; it puts the traveller and the sheets within reach of the wheel so that a couple sails the boat without anyone leaving the cockpit; and because the boat is not asked to carry a lounge on its roof, Marc Lombard, who has drawn the range since 2011, could keep the hulls narrow — plumb bows for waterline, small keels rather than daggerboards, and the volume the customer does not get is volume the boat does not have to drag. The yard is at Rochefort on the Charente and is small by the standards of the industry it competes in, around eighty boats a year, which is a rounding error beside Bordeaux. It has been passed around: begun in 1994 inside the Dufour group, sold to Bruno Voisard in 2002, bought by Bavaria in 2014, and sold again in 2018 to a private equity firm when Bavaria failed. The boats came through all three owners arguing the same thing.

They did once argue with themselves, and it is instructive. Under Bavaria in 2016 the 46 launched in two versions, Open and Fly, the second with the flybridge the rest of the market was selling — and Sail magazine's test of the Fly recommended that voyagers take the Open instead, for better weather protection, while the Fly suited sociable sailors who wanted the view and the seats. The range on offer today is Open again, top to bottom. Our shelf sits at the other end of it, on the model the yard built for a decade before replacing it:

Scout watches 14 live Nautitech askings, at an average of $397,809; what we publish asks $340,200 across 2017. That market is thin by construction and will stay thin, because a yard building eighty boats a year cannot leave the brokerage the fleet a Bordeaux production line does. A buyer here is choosing among a handful rather than sorting a hundred, which inverts the usual advice: the leverage is not in waiting for a better example of the same boat, it is in being ready when the one that fits appears.

What that helm position buys is documented. Yachting World, testing the Open 40, found the wheels set deep enough in the quarters to feel secure, put the sightlines ahead better than most of the market, and reported that visibility to leeward upwind beat that of most monohulls; they logged six to seven knots upwind and eight to nine reaching on a sail-area-to-displacement ratio of 23.5, and called the boat quite different from a typical production cat. The same test is where the arguments against start, and they are not small ones. Pointing trails a monohull's, the self-tacking jib does not accelerate out of a tack the way an overlapping headsail does, the fixed keels give away leeway that daggerboards would not, and the reviewer was blunt that there are angles from which the boat looks dumpy, squared-off and rather slab-sided. Those are the costs of the same decisions that make the boat sail: low coachroof, no boards, no flybridge.

The reason the Open and the Fly could both be sold as the safer choice is that the argument is not really about shelter, it is about what kind of exposure you accept. Sail's reviewer sent voyagers to the aft helms because a wheel down in the cockpit is inside the boat; the standing complaint about aft helms is that they are outside the coachroof, in the rain and the spray, where a flybridge or a bulkhead helm under a hardtop would not be. Both descriptions fit the same boat, and the way to settle it is not to read either of them but to stand at the wheel of a specific hull and look at what canvas it carries: a Nautitech's weather protection is bought at the sailmaker, not at the yard.

The build has one live question and it is date-bounded. Owners posting under a thread titled Nautitech construction problems describe boats from the post-2020 rush arriving with rudder and keel defects that the yard was slow to acknowledge and put right only once surveyors and lawyers were involved; others in the same discussion, including yards that service the brand alongside its competitors, rate the construction reasonable and the episode a production-rate failure rather than an engineering one. Both readings send a buyer of a hull from those years to the same two places — the rudder stocks and the keel joints — and to the same paperwork, which is the warranty correspondence rather than the handover file. On older hulls the more useful question is which owner's decade you are buying, since three changes of proprietor in twenty-four years is three different sets of hands on the parts pipeline.

Buy a Nautitech if you intend to actually steer the boat, if you would rather have a narrower hull that sails than a wider one that stores, and if you are two people who want the sheets where the wheel is. Look elsewhere if you want the elevated view and the outdoor sofa, if maximum interior volume per euro is the brief — that is the argument Lagoon wins on purpose — or if you need the dense dealer and parts network that comes with buying from a very large builder. The newest marque making a version of this same case, from inside the biggest group of all, is Excess; every catamaran we hold is on the catamaran shelf.