Astus sailboats: a Brittany trimaran builder engineered for the trailer as much as the water
Astus Boats is a French trailerable-trimaran builder based in Brech, in the Morbihan department of southern Brittany. Jean-Hubert Pommois founded the company in 2004 out of a personal passion for sailing, aiming to design a boat that answered several practical-use criteria at once; a transportable-trimaran concept emerged as the best compromise among those criteria, and it became the Astus 20.1. Multihulls World later credited that founding idea — compact trimarans with floats on telescoping tubes — with giving Astus its identity, distinguishing the builder from rivals Dragonfly, Corsair, and Tricat through stripped-down multihulls sold at attractive prices.
Origins and ownership
Astus Boats first exhibited its trimaran concept at a boat show in La Rochelle in 2004, and the production version of the Astus 20.1 appeared the following summer; the company built 7 boats in that first year. Pommois then set up a network of distributors to meet demand for the boats abroad, and in 2015 Astus expanded into the U.S. market with a local distributor and a presence at the Miami boat show. An October 2023 profile in BoatIndustry.com found Pommois still running the Brech shipyard, then employing 9 people, and reported that Astus had renewed its U.S. push by partnering with Maryland-based distributor Red Beard Sailing after an earlier attempt roughly a decade before had not succeeded. Astus's own history page put the company's worldwide total above 500 trimarans sailing; the same October 2023 profile separately quantified 500 units sold across Europe.
The designers
Naval architect Stéphan Vallet of VDESIGN designed Astus's earliest range: his own portfolio credits him with the Astus 20.1, which he called the initiator of "a gentle revolution" — a new generation of small trimaran sailboats — and also lists the Astus 22, describing it as borrowing part of its design brief from the wider Astusboats family. The range continued to evolve through the following decade before Astus began a new design partnership in 2016, bringing in VPLP Design for the Astus 16.5 — a collaboration the company said moved it into a new era of faster, more modern boats. VPLP's second Astus, the 20.5, followed in 2018 as a successor to the 20.2 and went on to sell 120 copies; VPLP's own materials describe the resulting range — 16.5, 20.5, 22.5, and 26.5 — as spanning leisure, raid, sport, and sport+ versions built to serve everyone from families on day trips to solo competitive sailors. Pommois described the VPLP-designed 22.5 as filling a segment between beach dinghies and cruising boats that he found underrepresented in the U.S. market.
Construction through the eras
Astus chose polyester for its molds early on, for reasons of both appearance and production. That approach became fully in-house in 2011, when the company added a dedicated polyester workshop at its Brech premises. The October 2023 BoatIndustry.com profile that documented the yard's staffing also found Astus sourcing skilled polyester and laminating labor through the Afpa training organization in nearby Auray, and reported that women had become a narrow majority of the workforce — a notably high feminization rate for the trade. On the design side, the 22.5, which the company dated to the turn of 2020–2021 across its own materials, stood out as the only model in the range offered with optional foils.
Lines and generations
Astus built out its range through parallel size classes rather than a single hull replaced wholesale. The 16-foot line ran from the 16.1, launched in 2006 and sold in 32 copies, to the VPLP-designed 16.5 of 2016, offered in a sports version with a powerful sail plan for private owners alongside a more forgiving rig built for sailing schools. The 14-foot line similarly spanned the 14.1 of 2007 (27 sold) and the 14.5, launched in 2020 despite the COVID-19 health crisis so the company could keep developing its range. The 20-foot boats went through the most iterations: the 20.1 gave way to the 20.2 in 2009 (117 sold), which VPLP's 20.5 succeeded in 2018. Astus also built a smaller day-boat companion, the 18.2, unveiled at the Nautic 2010 show as the 20.2's "little brother," and a mini cruiser, the Astus 22, released in 2008; its VPLP-designed successor, the 22.5, added four bunks and a small galley aimed at friends-and-family sailing, day trips, and coastal exploring. A one-off hybrid, the Bay Dream 5.5, sold 8 units after its 2013 launch as a simple leisure platform. Astus's flagship grew twice over: the cruiser-oriented Astus 24 launched in 2014 and was nominated for European Yacht of the Year 2015, and the larger Astus 26.5 — at 7.90 meters long with a beam ranging from 2.52 to 5.80 meters — became the new flagship available from 2025.
Who Astus is for
Astus suits sailors who want a trimaran's speed and stability without giving up trailer transport, across a range that stretches from small day-boats built for sailing schools to a cruiser-oriented flagship. Vallet's early "gentle revolution" and VPLP's later push toward faster, more modern designs read as two chapters of the same founding idea: a boat compact and simple enough to tow home.