Kelt sailboats: one yard, a rotating cast of French designers
Kelt Marine was a single shipyard on the Golfe du Morbihan, founded in 1974 by Gilles Le Baud, a Paris-born sailor who had won the Course de l'Aurore the year before aboard a Philippe Harlé design, the Araok Atao, before deciding, at 26, to dedicate himself to building sailboats. Rather than settle on one house designer, Le Baud commissioned a different naval architect for nearly every model that followed, and that rotating-designer arrangement came to define the brand more than any single hull shape did. At its peak the yard employed more than a hundred people and was counted, alongside Kirié, among the significant names in French sailboat production, behind industry leaders Bénéteau and Jeanneau.
Origins and ownership
Harlé's 6.20 was the yard's first boat: a molded-wood prototype won the French coastal-cruiser championship, and the production fiberglass-laminate version repeated the win the following year, in 1975. It became Le Baud's first real success, with more than 1,300 built between 1974 and 1984 (one account extends the run to 1986). Financial difficulty eventually forced a sale, and in the mid-1980s - sources put it at 1985 or 1986 - the Marine Chaufour Poncin group, owner of the Kirié shipyards at Les Sables-d'Olonne, absorbed Kelt Marine, and sailboat manufacturing was transferred to the Vendée. The Kelt name survived about a year before the range was renamed Feeling: the 6.20 became the Feeling 226, the 8.50 the Feeling 29, and the 39 the Feeling 39 - from there, that lineage belongs to Kirié's own history. Le Baud himself returned to the Paris region and found further success in industry, away from boating. The Kelt company and yard continued on a separate track toward motorboats - the Dayona brand under new owner Olivier Poncin from 1986, later the White Shark and Sea Hawk lines - through further changes of ownership (Dufour in 1999, Siparex in 2001, Poncin Yachts in 2005-06) until the Vannes plant closed for good in July 2009.
The designers
Harlé's 6.20 set the pattern that followed. Gilles Ollier drew the 8m, which topped the range as one of the largest cruisers on the market when it left the factory in 1979 (400 built), and the smaller 5.50, launched in 1978 for the Micro class. Jean Berret and Olivier Racoupeau, already established through work for Gib Sea and Bénéteau, designed the 7.60, voted Boat of the Year on release and built in 489 units between 1979 and 1985. Philippe Briand, who had already drawn the transportable but less successful 707, followed it with the 9m, developed after the yard circulated a questionnaire asking boaters what they wanted from an ideal sailboat. Gilles Vaton closed out the roster with the 8.50, an immediate hit that sold more than 600 boats and took a Boat of the Year title in 1983, and, two years later, the 39, built in the same spirit as the 8.50 (by then known as the Kelt 29).
Construction through the eras
Kelt's earliest boats carried the heavy laminate typical of 1970s production - the 8m's hull, for instance, was built up in the thick polyester layers of the era - while the 7.60 that followed added more deliberate engineering: hull and deck were molded with interlocking flanges bonded in lightweight polyester and through-bolted every six inches, the deck was a Divinycell sandwich reinforced with wire mesh at stress points, and the cast-iron keel was coated twice with coal-tar epoxy before being bolted into a hull recess. By the 8.50/29, construction had moved to a monolithic glass-fibre-reinforced polyester laminate, with the lifting-keel version built around a cast-iron grounding plate and stabilizing fins; early production units were simple but sound in their finish, while later examples finished under Kirié show more refined joinery.
Who Kelt is for
A Kelt is really a snapshot of one designer era at a time - a 1970s Harlé or Ollier hull, a Berret-Racoupeau racer-cruiser, or a Vaton-era 8.50 or 39 - from a yard that wound down its own sailboat production in the 1980s and handed the brand's later chapters to Feeling. That makes it a boat for buyers drawn to a specific, well-documented French design pedigree rather than to one builder name carried forward across decades.
