Gunboat sailboats: a carbon catamaran brand built across three continents
Gunboat is a performance-cruising catamaran brand that began as one boatbuilder's own boat. Peter Johnstone started thinking about a catamaran that would be fast, comfortable, and luxurious in 1999, and in 2001 he designed and built Tribe, a 62-foot cat with a light-displacement hull and a powerful sail plan meant to carry his own family safely and quickly, upwind and down. Tribe became Gunboat hull number one, and it launched the company: the boat proved so fast that even the shipyard's own team had to relearn how to sail. From that first hull, Gunboat spent the next decade and a half moving its factory across three continents — South Africa, China, and the United States — before a 2015 bankruptcy filing sent the brand to a fourth home, in France.
Origins and ownership
The newly incorporated Gunboat International began designing and building its cruising catamarans at a facility in Cape Town, South Africa. Founder Peter Johnstone — son of Bob Johnstone, of J/Boats and MJM Powerboats — later recalled the South Africa years as grinding out boats in low volume, and said the country simply wasn't the place to be, long-term, in the boat business; the young company got walloped by the recession there. In 2010 Johnstone decided to try production in China instead, building the 60 series at a facility that used a five-axis router for one-piece tooling. Peter closed the South Africa yard in July 2011. Ahead of the next move, Gunboat's headquarters sat in Rhode Island; North Carolina Governor Bev Purdue announced, at the end of January 2012, that the company would build a new facility in Wanchese — a small Roanoke Island town whose custom sportfisher-building trade had shrunk from 26 builders to five during the recession. The Wanchese facility was projected to create 71 positions over three years, with 12 openings immediately available. By 2015 the company had intended to widen its line further, with a 65, a 72, and a 77 planned in addition to the existing models. Instead, after 14 years, founder Peter Johnstone's company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2015. Grand Large Yachting — the La Grande-Motte, France group that had already built Allures Yachting, Garcia Yachting, and Outremer Yachting into ocean-going sailboat manufacturers — announced its acquisition of the Gunboat brand on May 13, 2016, relocating the company from North Carolina to a new 38,736-square-foot assembly facility in France. Grand Large Yachting's president, Stephan Constance, said the group was honored to take on the brand, while Xavier Demarest, president of the group's Outremer Yachting division, said the two sides had been talking for years before the deal closed. Under its new ownership, the yard launched its first new model, the 68-foot Condor, in January 2019.
The designers
Gunboat's early, South Africa-built boats — including the 48 — came from Morelli & Melvin, the California design firm that had just finished drawing Playstation, Steve Fossett's giant racing catamaran, when Gunboat brought them on. From 2008, the drawing board passed to English designer Nigel Irens, who penned the 55, 60, and 78. Irens' relationship with the brand outlasted the bankruptcy itself: in the gap between the Chapter 11 filing and the Grand Large Yachting purchase, the owner of an incomplete Gunboat 55 retained Irens to modify the boat — christened Vai Vai — out to 57 feet. After the move to France, Grand Large Yachting brought in VPLP Design, the French multihull-racing design house, as the brand's new designer — a change that came after every Gunboat model built through the South Africa, China, and North Carolina years.
Construction through the eras
Gunboat's hulls tracked the same materials arc as high-performance racing boats of the period. The earliest boats were laminated with vacuum-bagged polyester and E-glass; advances in the field pushed the yard toward carbon fiber for reinforcement, and by the third hull, the whole catamaran was built entirely from carbon. Reviewers described the resulting boats as monocoque structures — hull and deck vacuum-bagged and oven-cured as one continuous shape, with no evident flange at the joint, built up from foam or Nomex-honeycomb core sandwiched in epoxy, biaxial and unidirectional glass, Kevlar, and carbon. Daggerboards, rudders, spars, stringers, and crossbeams were carbon fiber throughout. The China-built 60 added an epoxy-infusion hull method that cut assembly time by several months, and the Wanchese-built 55's joinery was contracted to Zepsa Industries, a 30-year-old family firm in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Lines and generations
Only six examples of the Gunboat 48 were built, between 2004 and 2009, in South Africa; Cruising World noted its forward-cockpit layout — reached through a door off the central bridgedeck saloon — wasn't originally a Gunboat idea, one Johnstone himself acknowledged. The 66, launched during that same South Africa era, became the brand's proving ground: between 2010 and 2015, the Gunboat 66 Phaedo won regattas worldwide and, during an Atlantic crossing, outran the 88-meter mega-yacht Maltese Falcon. The 60 carried the brand through its China period, from 2012 to 2015. The 55 closed out the independent company's run — Gunboat sold 15 units before the first hull was even built, every one of them to a buyer new to multihulls altogether, a token of how far the brand's reputation had traveled by the North Carolina years.
Who Gunboat is for
Gunboat drew a following among sailors chasing genuine performance in a cruising catamaran — carbon construction and race-proven hulls, not a compromise cat built primarily for charter comfort. That identity survived a run of factory moves and a bankruptcy that would have ended a less distinct brand; buyers researching the South Africa-, China-, and North Carolina-built boats in this lineup are looking at the company's founding chapter, built before Grand Large Yachting's 2016 purchase reset the brand under new ownership in France.
