Latitude 46 sailboats: the yard at the 46th parallel
Latitude 46 takes its name from where it sits: the yard's own account places it "at the height of the 46th parallel" on the Île de Ré, founded in 1987 by the Joubert family. The yard doesn't build boats under its own name, though — its sailboats are sold as Tofinou, and its motor launches as Andréyale — so a buyer searching for "Latitude 46" by name alone is likely to come up short even when the boat in question is exactly what they're after.
Origins and ownership
Published accounts differ on where the Tofinou design itself began. Sud Ouest, profiling the yard in 2013, traces it to 1927, when a Captain Merle designed a boat built by a yard in Saint-Martin-de-Ré; its owner named it Tofinou. Decades later, by this account, Philippe Joubert founded the Île de Ré yard that became Latitude 46, working alongside his wife in boat guardianship and winter storage. He grew attached to the lines of an abandoned original Tofinou in his care and had a mould taken from it, starting a polyester production series. Boat Tomorrow tells it differently, dating the design to 1928 and crediting Bertrand Danglade with finding the hull on an Île de Ré mudflat in 1986. By Boat Tomorrow's account, the single mould taken from that hull went on to produce 230 boats and found the marque.
The yard changed hands more than once after that. Four years after Latitude 46 launched a 9.50-metre Tofinou in 2003, Philippe Joubert retired and sold the yard to Christian Iscovici, who said he had spent years working for Bénéteau and wanted something more artisanal. A later factory move away from the historic Île de Ré premises ran three months behind schedule and landed in peak boating season; the resulting cash-flow shortfall pushed the company into French court-supervised insolvency-safeguard proceedings. By March 2015, five parties had come forward to the La Rochelle commercial court seeking to acquire the yard out of that proceeding — among them a Geneva-based owner of a Latitude 46 boat, reflecting Switzerland's importance as an export market for the company. The buyer that emerged was Experton-Revollier, an industrial group specializing in steel processing that had already entered boatbuilding by acquiring the historic Wauquiez marque in 2011; it took over Latitude 46 in 2015 and added Rhéa Marine to the group in 2018. Iscovici stayed on as the yard's leader through the changeover — heading both Latitude 46 and, from 2016, Wauquiez too — until he retired on 31 October 2020.
The designers
The 2003 9.50-metre Tofinou was designed by Michel Joubert, working with Bernard Nivelt; the boat found buyers well beyond France, especially in Switzerland, along with England, Italy, and Spain. Michel Joubert is not the yard's founder — he was the founder's brother, and the two should never be confused. Philippe Joubert built and, for two decades, led the yard itself; Michel was one half of Joubert-Nivelt, described by Boat Tomorrow as one of France's most prolific design offices. Michel Joubert died in 2016, and design work then passed to Michele Molino, who drew the current 9.7 together with Peugeot's car designers, per Boat Tomorrow. Separately, for the 12-metre Tofinou, Latitude 46 brought in designer Philippe Starck to redesign the interior, with fine woods and leather stowage from Goyard.
Lines and generations
The range began as a single design — the original dayboat rediscovered on the Île de Ré — before growing under Iscovici's ownership, which added 8-, 12-, and 16-metre models and moved the brand from open dayboat to genuine cabin cruiser. Design credit shifted again after 2016, when the current 9.7 emerged from Michele Molino's pairing with Peugeot's car designers, described above.
One entry in Latitude 46's lineup does not fit this history. Our catalog credits the yard with a Tadorne, but the five sources gathered for this page — the yard's own history, two French trade-press accounts, a regional feature, and an independent review — are silent on it entirely; not one names a boat called Tadorne. Rather than force an unconfirmed model into a documented history, this page says so plainly: the Tadorne's place in the Latitude 46 story remains unverified.
Who Latitude 46 is for
Latitude 46 suits a buyer already sold on the Tofinou story — a rediscovered pre-war daysailer hull, remoulded, that grew under a changing cast of owners into a small range of larger cruising boats designed by some of French yacht design's more recognizable names. It's a yard whose history runs through Bénéteau, by way of Iscovici's background; through Wauquiez and Rhéa Marine, by way of the Experton-Revollier group that came to hold all three; and through two unrelated Jouberts whose shared surname has confused more than one account of the brand. None of that continuity says anything about a specific boat's condition, but it does mean a used Tofinou carries an unusually well-documented lineage for a boat this size — provided a buyer knows to look for it under the right name.