Nautitech sailboats: an open, aft-helm cockpit built through four owners' hands
Nautitech has spent three decades building a specific idea of what a cruising catamaran should feel like: an open living area that merges saloon and cockpit, steered from paired aft helm stations rather than a raised bridge. That identity has survived four owners - the monohull builder that created it, the independent yard that rebuilt it, and two industrial parents that have run it since.
Origins and ownership
Nautitech began in 1994 as a catamaran line created within the Dufour Yachts Group. Roughly 150 units built between 1995 and 2000 were still sailing years later even after the brand itself went fallow, once Dufour chose to refocus on monohulls. Bruno Voisard - a former naval carpenter known in the industry for having created and run VPM, once a charter-boat subsidiary of Nouvelles Frontières - completed a buyout of the Nautitech brand in September 2002 through his Nantes-based holding company, Marine Développement, later opening 15 percent of the company's capital to the Nantes investment fund Irus. Voisard's Nautitech took over the former Sysba builder's unit in La Rochelle, turning it into the 4,000-square-meter Fora Marine plant, which employed 25 people in its first year.
Between 2004 and 2006 the yard built out its own production tooling in La Rochelle and launched the 44 and 40; it moved to its current Rochefort site in 2008-2009 alongside the 441 and 442, and presented the first 54 in 2011. Bavaria Yachts acquired 51 percent of Nautitech in 2014, extending its own production lines and giving the yard, in its own words, the industrial means to keep developing; Voisard's side retained 49 percent of the company and kept management, so that the know-how built up over more than a decade could pass to the Germans. Bavaria's own parent company ran into financial trouble a few years later: in April 2018 Bavaria Yachtbau went into self-administration after its backers refused further funding, putting up to 800 jobs at risk. Later that year the private equity firm Capital Management-Partners, which specializes in acquiring distressed German companies, bought the entire Bavaria business, including the French subsidiary that builds Nautitechs; all 250 employees at the Rochefort plant transferred to the new owner alongside 550 at Bavaria's Giebelstadt yard in Germany, and CMP took over operative management on site. The yard, based in Rochefort sur Mer - a town the company describes as the cradle of French shipbuilding and naval architecture and the birthplace of Pierre Loti - is led by CEO Gildas Le Masson, employs around 150 people, and builds roughly 50 catamarans a year, more than 70 percent of them exported through more than 50 agents worldwide.
The designers
Nautitech's early models - the 40, the 395, and the 47 - were designed by the La Rochelle-based naval architects Mortain & Mavrikios. Marc Lombard Yacht Design Group became the yard's long-standing design partner, credited with the 40 Open, the 44 Open, the 46 Open, and the 48 Open, where Marc Lombard Yacht Design Group handled the architecture and exterior while Christophe Chedal-Anglay designed the interior. Lombard's connection to the boats went beyond the drawing board: he personally owned and sailed a 40 Open named Et HOP, living aboard daily with his wife between 2015 and 2022 and putting the design to the test through real, demanding everyday use. Marc Lombard has since died; following the 44 Open and 48 Open, his firm is slated to design the exterior of the upcoming 41 Type S.
Construction through the eras
Reviewers have documented Nautitech's construction model by model rather than as one fixed formula. The 435, from the Voisard era, was built as a vacuum-bagged sandwich of non-woven bidirectional and tri-directional cloth in isophthalic resin over closed-cell PVC foam, with epoxy-laminated plywood bulkheads, foam-filled forepeaks, and fin keels built independently of the hulls to limit grounding damage. Later, the 40 Open's hulls were built with a resin-infused technique reviewers called light, strong, and uniform, with closed-cell foam-cored decks, while the 48 Open's hull and deck were foam-cored and vacuum-infused, with interior bulkheads cored and reinforced with carbon fiber to save weight. During Bavaria's ownership, boats.com and SAIL Magazine both reported that Nautitechs continued final assembly at the original Rochefort factory even as woodwork and interior joinery were partly fabricated at Bavaria's Giebelstadt plant in Germany. Production tooling was modernized again in 2021 alongside a shift to a multi-product line, and the Voisard-era 441 won Cruising World's 2013 Boat of the Year award for catamarans under 45 feet.
Lines and generations
Nautitech says it was first to combine saloon and cockpit into one open, spacious living area. Yachting World wrote that the 44 Open remains faithful to Nautitech's paired aft helm stations, sheltered under twin biminis, rather than moving to a raised command bridge - a layout boats.com credited on the 46 Open with close crew communication, at the cost of sightlines more restricted than a raised helm typically offers. Yachting World also described the 44 Open's nacelle as less pronounced and voluminous than on typical production cruising catamarans. The Open name carried across several generations - 40 Open, 44 Open, 46 Open, 48 Open - alongside Fly variants such as the 46 Fly, introduced in 2016, and a 2019 pairing of a new 46 in both Open and Fly versions. The original 40 Open, introduced in the 2013-14 window, became the line's longest-running model: after thirteen years and 259 units, Nautitech retired it, calling it a benchmark in the cruising catamaran market. The upcoming 41 Type S continues the Lombard design relationship.
Who Nautitech is for
Cruising World described the 44 Open - developed in just fourteen months during the pandemic, after Nautitech asked around a dozen owners and dealers what they wanted in a midsize cruising catamaran - as the first new Nautitech model since the yard had reintroduced the brand three years earlier. A company representative told the magazine that where roughly 60 percent of earlier Nautitechs had gone into charter fleets, the goal for the 44 Open was to shrink that to about 10 percent of annual sales. That combination fits buyers who want a cockpit-centered, socially open catamaran with a distinct sailing feel, from a yard that has held onto the same low-helm, merged-cockpit identity through four owners' worth of change.
