Solaris Catamarans

Solaris never had a house designer, and that is the most useful thing to know before buying one. The yard built catamarans at Southampton from 1974 to 2000, and across five models it hired three different pencils: the Solaris 42 and the Sunrise 36 were bespoke commissions from the British naval architect Terry Compton, the Sunstream 40 was developed from the Cherokee 35 that J.R. Rod Macalpine-Downie drew for Sailcraft, and the Sunstar 36 and 32 came out of moulds pulled to designs by the Frenchman Eric Lerouge. A yard organised that way has a manufacturing philosophy rather than a design one, and the practical consequence is that its boats do not share a temperament. There is no such thing as "how a Solaris sails" — there is only how a Compton sails, how a Lerouge sails, and how a hull descended from a Macalpine-Downie design sails.

That last name is the one to recognise. Macalpine-Downie co-designed Lady Helmsman, which won the International C-Class trophy three times from 1966, was the first to develop the wing mast and the una rig, and went on to draw the Crossbow boats that took the world sailing speed record past forty knots. None of that is in the boat we hold, and the distinction matters: ours is from the Lerouge end of the catalogue, not the Macalpine-Downie end.

What we hold of this yard is small enough to name individually — 1 on the published shelf, 1992, asking $87,500, out of 1 we watch anywhere and 1 of their models. A holding that size cannot tell you what the market thinks; it can only put a real boat in front of you at a real number:

Now the part a buyer has to be told, because it changes how this boat should be approached. The fullest account of the yard anywhere — the one the attributions above come from — names no weaknesses at all, and neither does anything else we could find in English or French: no magazine test survives in a reachable archive, there is no owners' association with a presence we could verify, and there is no recall record. That silence has an ordinary cause. This was a small builder that closed twenty-six years ago, in an era whose British boating press is largely offline, and too few hulls were made for their faults to have become common knowledge the way a Prout's or a Catalina's did. So the usual second-hand protection — knowing what goes wrong with these before you look at one — simply is not available here, and the survey is not a formality but the entire evidence base. On a thirty-four-year-old boat described as having foam-cored topsides, that means a moisture survey of the core is not an optional extra, and the buyer should assume no parts pipeline exists behind any of it.

Set against that, what the record does say is consistent: these boats have a reputation for stability, for safety, and for using their space well, and the 1992 Sunstar is described as sturdily built with a well-balanced rig one person can handle. That is a fair description of a good small cruising catamaran, and it is worth exactly as much as an unexamined reputation ever is. Buy one if you are the kind of buyer who would rather have a surveyor's word than a forum's, and if a boat with no support network behind it reads as a project rather than a risk. Buy elsewhere if you want the reassurance of a fleet — a class association, a parts supplier, a hundred owners who have already made your mistakes. The model is the Sunstar 32, and the rest of what we watch under sail with two hulls is on the catamaran shelf.