Elite sailboats: the Canadian badge on a French cruising pedigree
Elite was never its own shipyard. It was the name Kirié, a French builder based at Les Sables d'Olonne, put on the Canadian and North American edition of its "Feeling" range of fast cruising sailboats, produced under license at a yard in Sorel, Québec. The badge covers real, confirmed pairings — the Elite 364 shares its hull with the Feeling 1090, the Elite 326 with the Feeling 326, the Elite 446 with the Feeling 446, and the Elite 37 with the Feeling 1100 — and the wider Elite lineup ran from 1981 to 1995, spanning a 24.7-foot daysailer up to a 63.7-footer. The naval-architecture lineage behind it runs through one French office: Philippe Harlé, working alone at first and then, from 1984, as Harlé & Mortain — the firm Alain Mortain later named the Feeling range among its most significant work, and whose Elite 324 design credit is directly on record.
Origins and ownership
Accounts of Kirié's founding disagree. One trade retrospective traces the yard's history to 1912, when it took shape in a small garage on rue de la Forêt in Sables d'Olonne building small wooden pleasure boats; a regional heritage archive instead credits Auguste Kirié with opening a yard under his own name in Sables d'Olonne in 1927, after earlier stints working shipyards along the Marne and Seine and running a boat-rental operation. His son Claude, born in 1917, joined as an apprentice at age 13 and took over the yard's management in 1942, a wartime appointment that spared him deportation for forced labor in Germany. Claude Kirié was also a competitive powerboat racer, winning the Six Heures de Paris in 1960 in a series-production Milan 500 before being killed in an accident during the same race in October 1964, when his Volvo-powered runabout crashed under the Bir-Hakeim bridge. Production shifted toward powerboats in the 1950s, and by the late 1960s Kirié was among the first yards to work in polyester construction, launching the motor-powered "Anges de mer" line and the sailing "Fifty" line before turning, in the early 1980s, to the fast-cruising "Feeling" range that Elite would later rebadge for Canada. In the 1980s the yard became part of the MCP group, and Christian Kirié joined the company to create the Daytona range in 1987-1988. Ownership then passed to Alliaura Marine — reports differ on the exact year, with one account dating the takeover to 2000, completing Alliaura's 1996 purchase of the Privilège catamaran builder Jantôt Marine, and a regional archive instead placing the Kirié acquisition itself in 1996. Alliaura Marine went on to build luxury sailboats, Privilège catamarans, and Feeling monohulls; based in Lanester from 2008 and employing 70 people, it posted 14 million euros in revenue in 2009 before being bought at the end of 2011 by corporate turnaround specialist Mathieu Burthey. The Le Mans commercial court placed the company into court-ordered liquidation not long after, permitting one further month of operation; the original Kirié premises had already closed in April 2009, and the disused building later burned down in November 2019.
The designers
Philippe Harlé (1931-1991) trained at the Centre nautique des Glénans, where he became one of its instructors, and scored his first major success with the Muscadet, designed in 1962. After settling in La Rochelle in 1968 he collaborated across his career with a roster of yards that included Aubin, Jeanneau, Garcia, Kirié, Dufour, and Etap, working alone at first and then, from 1984, in partnership with Alain Mortain — and, from 1991, with Yiannis Mavrikios as well. Over his career Harlé drew more than 200 models totaling some 14,000 boats built; his biography was later written by his wife, Claude Harlé, together with journalist and maritime writer Dominique Le Brun. Mortain had joined Harlé's design office initially as an intern, spending a full month drafting the complete structural plans for the Maracuja prototype; the Harlé & Mortain partnership lasted until Harlé's death in 1991, producing roughly forty designs over eight years across monohulls and multihulls, and Mortain himself later named the Feeling range — the Elite line's French counterpart — among the designs he considers most significant from his career. Naval architect Gilles Vaton, born in Quimper in 1952 and now working in Marseille, trained under André Mauric, designer of Pen Duick VI, before making his own mark in pleasure-boat design; one of his recurring signatures was placing the engine beneath the saloon table, as on the Feeling 286.
Construction through the eras
Kirié's move into polyester construction by the late 1960s put it ahead of much of the French industry, and the Feeling range that followed in the early 1980s carried that construction tradition forward into the boats Elite would sell in Canada. On the Elite-badged boats specifically, the documented record is narrow but consistent: the Elite 324, credited to Philippe Harlé's design and built by Kirié, had a fiberglass hull, and the Elite 346 was likewise Kirié-built, first produced in 1985.
Lines and generations
The clearest way to read the Elite lineup is as a licensed export edition running in parallel with Kirié's domestic Feeling range rather than as an independent design program. The range built at Sorel between 1981 and 1995 covered a wide size spread, from the 24.7-foot Elite 25 up through the 63.7-foot Elite 64, with most models clustering in the 30-to-45-foot cruising range in between — Kirié's Canadian outlet, in other words, offered nearly the same breadth of choice its French Feeling buyers had, just under a different name.
Who Elite is for
An Elite is, at heart, a French-designed cruising sailboat wearing a Canadian badge: the hull, and in most documented cases the design credit, trace straight back to Kirié's Feeling range and to Philippe Harlé's design office. That makes the appeal specific — buyers drawn to Harlé's fast-cruising pedigree, and to a yard with a genuine early claim to polyester construction, who also want a boat built and sold into the North American market under license rather than imported directly from France.
