Aloa sailboats: a Cannes-area yard's racer-cruisers, forged through a receivership and a rescue
Aloa Marine built fibreglass racer-cruisers on the French Riviera through the 1970s, working with a rotating cast of outside naval architects rather than a single house designer. A financial crisis pushed the yard into court-ordered receivership in early 1975; it reorganized under new ownership within the year and kept building before the yard eventually closed.
Origins and ownership
Aloa Marine built its boats on the French Riviera, originally under the name SEB Marine and based in Mandelieu, near Cannes, before the yard relocated and later operated from the Cannes-La Bocca industrial zone. Workers occupied the factory there as the financial crisis that would end in receivership took hold, and the Cannes commercial court placed Aloa-Marine into court-ordered receivership on January 31, 1975.
Founder François Brutsch had put his personal fortune into building the yard. When Aloa-Marine reorganized under new ownership on January 5, 1976, Brutsch sold all of the company's shares to Alex Gouy, the former head of the household-appliance firm Cadillac, for a symbolic sum, and agreed to personally shoulder a fifth of the company's outstanding debts as part of the settlement; the remainder was arranged to be repaid to creditors in full over a fifteen-year term. Ninety-three of Aloa-Marine's 253 employees were rehired by the following April, and the workforce was projected to return to its prior size within three years.
Aloa Marine's yard later closed.
The designers
Aloa's sailboats didn't come from one drafting table. J-M L'Hermenier designed the Aloa 21, the marque's earliest model, built from 1969 to 1976. Jacques Fauroux designed the Aloa 23 R, built from 1978 to 1979. For the Aloa 29, Aloa Marine again commissioned Groupe Finot's design office — credited with three earlier successes for the yard, the Écume de mer, the Passatore, and the Brin de folie — to draw a monocoque built for performance and comfort.
Construction through the eras
Materials stayed conventional across the range: fibreglass — polyester, in the period's French usage — formed the hull and deck on both the Aloa 27 and the smaller Aloa 17, and the Aloa 23 R was built in polyester as well. Keel choices varied by size: the Aloa 27 rode on an iron keel, while the Aloa 17 used a swing keel instead of a fixed one.
Lines and generations
The Aloa 21, L'Hermenier's design, opened the range in 1969 and ran through 1976. The Aloa 23 followed from 1972 to 1976, with the Fauroux-designed Aloa 23 R arriving later as a distinct model built from 1978 to 1979. The Aloa 25 and Aloa 27 both date to the mid-to-late 1970s, built alongside the receivership and restart years. The Aloa 29, Groupe Finot's design, ran the longest of any Aloa model, from 1973 to 1980, and became the yard's highest-volume boat, with 320 units built. At the top of the range, Aloa Marine offered a 34-footer in two named trims, the Croisière and the GTE.
Who Aloa is for
Aloa's history reads as a small Riviera builder's survival story as much as a boat lineage — a yard that weathered a court-ordered receivership and a change of ownership while working with a different independent designer for nearly every model, from L'Hermenier on its earliest boat to Fauroux on the 23 R to Groupe Finot's office on its best-selling 29. Buyers drawn to that specific chapter of French sailboat history, built by a yard that no longer operates, are the natural audience here, more than buyers looking for one consistent house design across the range.
