Jouet sailboats: a Sartrouville lineage that ran from riverboats to fiberglass cruisers
Jouet traces to a single French yard on the Seine at Sartrouville, one that carried the family name through three generations of ownership before ending its run as Yachting France.
Origins and ownership
Carpenter Antoine Blondeau, who ran a laundry boat on the Seine at Sartrouville, built his first boat shed there in 1872. In 1920, maritime engineer Paul Jouët partnered with Blondeau to found the Chantiers navals de Sartrouville, and by 1927 the yard had expanded and taken the name P. Jouët & Cie. Paul's son, Jean-Pierre Jouët, joined the business in 1951, already well acquainted with it. In 1958 he arranged for a shipyard in Dieppe to produce polyester hulls, moving the yard into fiberglass construction. In 1965, rather than commit further capital to the still-young recreational boating industry, Jean-Pierre sold the company to the Dubigeon-Normandie group; production moved and continued under the Yachting France name. Yachting France remained a major name in French boatbuilding until it closed in the late 1980s, a casualty of the industry's first downturn.
The designers
Paul Jouët hired naval architect Eugène Cornu in 1925, a partnership credited with shaping the yard's design history. The yard's own Tiburon appeared in 1962 and, under an agreement with the Chantiers de Loire-Normandie, was series-built at Grand-Quevilly near Rouen. Jouët also built the Carl Alberg-designed Triton under American license, and a 1962 sea trial in Bateaux magazine speculated that the ballast and rigging of the Golif — Jouët's own 6.5-meter fiberglass design launched that same year — owed something to the license-built Triton. Later, under Yachting France, naval architect Philippe Harlé designed the Jouët 27 — sold first as the Tarentelle until 1976 — which the yard built from 1973 to 1978 in 350 units.
Who Jouet is for
A Jouet suits buyers drawn to a distinct chapter of French sailboat history: small and midsize cruisers built across the fiberglass transition of the 1960s through the 1980s, from a yard that changed ownership and name more than once but kept building through most of two decades.
