Edel sailboats: one Lyon-area family, two acts — numbered cruisers, then catamarans
Edel was a single French family boatbuilder, Constructions Nautiques Edel of Décines near Lyon, whose two-decade run of numbered fiberglass cruisers gave way, after a 1980s reorganization, to a shorter run of catamarans built under a successor company still led by the same family. Twin brothers Maurice and Pierre Edel founded the yard, and Maurice worked as its principal designer through nearly all of it, first on the small cruisers that carried the company through the 1960s and 70s, then on the catamarans that carried it, and eventually ended it, by the mid-1990s.
Origins and ownership
Maurice and Pierre Edel, twins from Pau, began after the Second World War by building river-descent canoes near their hometown before settling a workshop in Décines, on rue de la Vacherie near the Grand Large reservoir. They founded the Edel shipyard there in 1956. Their first fiberglass boat, named the Grand Large, is credited by the yard's own heritage history as the first French boat built of plastic. At the height of production the yard employed 110 people, and Maurice's sons, Marc and Luc, did their schoolwork on the fabric-cutting table after school. The company filed for bankruptcy in July 1980, and by the spring of 1983 Constructions Nautiques Edel SA had been liquidated and reconstituted as Edel Strat, with Marc Edel now installed as managing director and diversifying the business. Pierre Edel, Maurice's twin, died of cancer in 1987, after which Maurice worked alone. Edel Strat's activities ceased definitively in January 1995; the name and assets then passed to a further company, Edel Catamaran, which itself closed permanently in 2005.
The designers
Maurice Edel worked at the drawing board as the company's sole in-house designer for nearly twenty years, drawing every first-generation model himself with one exception: the Edel 3, whose plans were commissioned from naval architect Philippe Harlé so the boat would qualify under the RORC's 15-foot rating. Maurice added ballast to Harlé's design against the architect's wishes, and the boat became only a partial commercial success. Decades later, Maurice met naval architect Sylvestre Langevin — designer of the Elf Aquitaine catamaran that won the Route du Rhum with skipper Marc Pajot — through Christian Leroy, advertising director of the magazine Neptune-Yachting. The pairing, credited jointly as "Langevin-Edel," shaped the company's entire catamaran generation. Maurice Edel never patented his design innovations, reasoning, as he put it to Voiles et Voiliers, that a good idea belongs to everyone.
Construction through the eras
The Grand Large launched the yard into fiberglass in its earliest years, a material choice the heritage account credits as a first for a French boatbuilder. The later catamarans took a different construction approach: the Cat 33's hulls and cockpit-and-bridgedeck assembly could be dismantled via a system of aluminum beams, letting the boat be delivered in kit form for reassembly on site — a method dealers nicknamed the boat "Edel Kit."
Lines and generations
The numbered cruisers anchored the company's first two decades. The Edel II, launched in the summer of 1966, stayed in the catalog for sixteen years and sold in the thousands, making it the line's longest-running and best-selling model. The Edel 4 followed in 1971 and the Edel 5 in 1972; the Edel VI was crowned "Boat of the Year" at the Paris boat show in January 1976, only for the company's Meyzieu factory to burn down the very next day — the model nonetheless went on to be built in the hundreds over the following nine years, and its GTE variant raced in the earliest Mini Transat 6.50 events in 1977 and 1979, skippered among others by Bruno Peyron and Brigitte Oudry. The catamaran generation followed the 1983 reorganization: the Cat 26, designed by Langevin as a coastal camping catamaran, was an immediate success on its 1984 launch, and the Langevin-Edel Cat 33 followed in 1985, built in kit form and, per Multihulls World, appreciated by charter companies despite its rustic, low-priced build — one of Maurice's brothers, Bernard, sailed a Cat 33 across the Atlantic twice, once solo. An enlarged derivative, the Cat 35, extended that reception with what Multihulls World called an "impressive career" among both rental fleets and private owners. The line's final chapter, the Cat 42/43, was elected "Boat of the Year 1991" in France, but it arrived on the back of costly new tooling and an expensive new factory; a chartering company's bankruptcy cut its projected build volume in half, and fraud by a German buyer of several units helped precipitate the company's end.
Who Edel is for
Edel's identity splits cleanly along its own history: buyers drawn to small, transportable French cruisers with a trace of racing pedigree will find it in the numbered line, down to the Edel VI's Mini Transat connection, while buyers after a simply built, accessibly priced catamaran with real charter-fleet mileage will find it in the Cat 33 and Cat 35. Voiles et Voiliers grouped Maurice Edel with Dufour, Mallard, Bénéteau, and Jeanneau among the builders who helped establish the modern French recreational-boating industry — company he kept despite running, by comparison, a small and short-lived yard. He died at 86, having quietly published a memoir titled "L'Armada des Edel toutes voiles dehors."
