Broadblue sailboats: catamarans rebuilt twice from Prout's remains
Broadblue Catamarans exists because a UK furniture company bought the wreckage of a much older, more storied builder — and because, six years later, its own directors had to rescue the resulting company a second time. The result is a brand whose identity runs backward as much as forward: through the pedigree of Prout Catamarans, through Broadblue's own bankruptcy and relaunch, and into a lineup still anchored by the one model that survived both eras.
Origins and ownership
Broadblue's story begins with Prout Catamarans, built on an unlikely foundation: brothers Francis and Roland Prout were top UK canoeists who competed at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and their catamaran-building career began after they sailed an experimental boat made from two canoes lashed together. From that start, Prout went on to build more than 4,000 boats ranging from 26 to 70 feet over more than 40 years. But the company's fortunes turned: in July 2000, after struggling with declining sales and mounting losses, Prout was bought by Quest, a subsidiary of the Canadian Winfair Group; it fell into receivership a little more than a year later, then declared bankruptcy a second time in early 2002.
What remained of Prout was bought in mid-2002 by Broadblue — itself a furniture company that also ran a shipbuilding school near the Prout plant — which hired several of Prout's key staff into the newly formed Broadblue Catamarans Ltd. Accounts of exactly when the yard was "founded" diverge: Yachting Monthly credits Mark Elliot with founding Broadblue in 2001 using cash from his furniture business, while Trade-A-Boat frames the mid-2002 Prout purchase itself as the company's formation. Either way, from 2002 until mid-2008 Broadblue built rebadged and refitted Prout designs alongside some newer styles.
In July 2008, Broadblue struck a deal with Hillyards, a long-established UK South Coast boatbuilder and repair yard, to take over production of the 415 — which Trade-A-Boat called highly regarded — with Hillyard also brought in to develop a planned Broadblue 500 that never left the drawing board. By 2009, three 42s had been built at Canvey Island, with a fourth, unfinished hull stranded at the now-failed Hillyard yard. Broadblue went into liquidation in January 2009.
The rescue came a month later. Mark Elliot — who had sold his original stake in 2006 — teamed up with Mark Jarvis of the Emsworth catamaran brokerage Multihull World to relaunch the brand, telling Yachting Monthly they had "no choice but to put it straight." Accounts differ on exactly what the pair acquired from the receivers: one describes intellectual property, trademark, brand names and tooling; another describes moulds for two specific hull sizes. What's consistent across both is that the pair came away with the Broadblue name, trademark, IP and key moulds. Jarvis, admitting to Yachting Monthly that the brand had a "chequered history," argued that careful organisation could still produce a comeback — invoking Prout's own record, catamarans that by his account had "35 million miles under their keels," as evidence of the underlying design pedigree.
Production resumed at Canvey Island in Essex — what Yachting Monthly called the "ancestral home" of UK multihull building — through boatbuilder TEC, whose catamaran expertise dated back to Prout itself. The 385, Jarvis said, had always been built in Poland and would continue to be. The sales office relocated to Multihull World's Emsworth base, closing the earlier Ipswich office. The company's own materials describe it as building in Poland and Cornwall, led by Design and Production Director Mark Jarvis, who holds an MSc in engineering, and President Jim Gunn, described on the company's site as a financial authority and active marine business entrepreneur.
The designers
Broadblue's post-Prout design credits center on a small handful of names. The boat that became the Broadblue 345 launched in 2007 as the Voyager 10, a Mark Jarvis-instigated design; renamed the 345, it was reintroduced in tweaked form as the 346 when production shifted from China to Poland after the relaunch, its specification crediting Derick Reynolds, Darren Newton and Jarvis together. At the performance end, the Rapier 550 paired designer Nic Bailey with Darren Newton's Multimarine yard: Bailey drew a split galley and saloon for the first boat built, aiming for an open-plan but cohesive feel, while Newton pushed the mast base aft to allow larger foresails, raising the bridgedeck on a section forward of the compression post to suit.
Construction through the eras
The 385 is the line-defining model that bridges both eras of the company, and its construction is the best documented in the range. Built to the European Category A Ocean-going standard, it combines monolithic FRP below the waterline — described elsewhere as solid glass reinforced with Kevlar in loaded areas — with an FRP-balsa sandwich above, foam-cored bulkheads, and marine-grade-plywood reinforcement at hardware points. The keels are integrally moulded with the hulls but sealed off from them, forming a double bottom, and each carries a stainless-steel shoe; skeg-hung rudders run to the same depth as the keels, letting the boat be beached rather than hauled for maintenance. Cruising World counted five bulkheads and six flotation compartments, along with hardened glass windows set in aluminum frames, and noted the hulls are Polish-built and finished in the UK. Trade-A-Boat, surveying the lineage from Prout through Broadblue, called the resulting reputation one of "legendary blue water durability."
Lines and generations
The 385 has carried the brand continuously from the earliest Prout-descended era onward, evolving through at least an S3-to-S4 development the company itself describes. Around it sit the shorter-lived lines shaped by the 2008 crisis and 2009 relaunch: the Hillyard-built 415 and the unbuilt 500 project, the China-then-Poland-built 345/346 descended from the 2007 Voyager 10, and the performance-oriented Rapier 550, drawn by Nic Bailey with Darren Newton's Multimarine yard.
Who Broadblue is for
Broadblue suits a buyer who wants a European-built cruising catamaran with a genuine, if scarred, pedigree — one descended from Prout's decades of catamaran experience, shaped by two corporate near-failures, and still led by the same broker-turned-owner, Mark Jarvis, who helped bring the brand back in 2009. It isn't a brand with an unbroken corporate history, but the 385's continuity across both eras, and the company's own account of its Poland-and-Cornwall build, give that pedigree a throughline a shopper can actually trace.