Prout sailboats: the Essex yard behind the world's first production catamaran
G. Prout & Sons started out building canoes and folding dinghies on Canvey Island, Essex, and ended up, by the account of the National Maritime Museum Cornwall, building the world's first production catamaran. Brothers Roland and Francis Prout carried a competitive canoe-racing background into the boats that made the family name, and their catamaran designs went on to shape how the wider industry rated and regulated multihulls. The company traded independently for decades before a 2000 sale, a 2001 administration, and a February 2002 liquidation ended it — a collapse that, indirectly, gave rise to Broadblue Catamarans.
Origins and ownership
Geoffrey Prout and his sons, Roland and Francis, formed G. Prout & Sons in 1935, specializing in canoes and folding dinghies built as yacht tenders and opening a small factory on Canvey Island after the Second World War. Before catamarans, Roland and Francis's main passion was competitive canoe and kayak racing, and both were picked to represent Britain at the 1952 Olympics. Their first catamaran, Shearwater I, won a class handicap race outright at the Burnham-on-Crouch regatta week in 1954, and in 1956 the brothers entered the first Shearwater III in the inaugural Cross-Channel Dinghy Race from Folkestone to Boulogne, beating the best racing dinghy helmsmen of the day — including Uffa Fox — by more than an hour. The Shearwater III class earned Royal Yachting Association recognition by 1959, and the museum credits it as the world's first production catamaran, with sail numbers that have since passed 2,000.
The commercial end came fast. To stay afloat before its 2000 sale, Prout contract-built Moody Elite monohulls in 31- and 34-foot sizes, and from 1998 it outsourced production of its smaller catamarans to a company in South Africa, while its Panther power catamarans and yachts over 60 feet were built at the Concordia Yard in Rayong, Thailand. Accounts differ on the buyer: Yachting Monthly described Quest, which bought the yard in July 2000, as a "US-based diversified boat charter, marinas and condominiums group," while an owner-documented history describes Quest as a subsidiary of Canada's Winfair Group. Either way, by 2001 the UK yard was taking around 5,000 man-hours to build a 38-footer — double the original estimate — even as the range was streamlined to just the 38 and 46, with a new 43-foot sport-rig catamaran planned and an Ed Dubois-designed sailing catamaran already in build in Thailand. The original company entered administration on 12 September 2001; longtime managing director Rob Underwood, asked by Yachting Monthly that December to comment on the company's situation, said only, "I can't make any comment or I'll be shot." A new company, Prout UK, took over the Canvey Island premises, but a phone call from Canada on 13 February 2002 told employees to pack up their belongings and leave. Broadblue Catamarans picked up the Prout 38 afterward, building it as the slightly modified Prestige 38, alongside a 46-foot model and plans for a 42-footer; Underwood became Broadblue's managing director, and Prout's chief designer moved with him.
Construction through the eras
Across the cruising range, Prout's catamarans shared a family design logic: beam-to-length ratios under 50 percent, a "minsail" cutter rig stepped well aft so sails could be handled from the cockpit, low-aspect-ratio keels for shallow draft and beachability, and skeg-mounted rudders. The Snowgoose line, probably the most prolific in Prout's history with hundreds built, illustrates how that logic evolved: early Snowgoose 37 hulls were solid fiberglass with molded stub keels, later ones went solid below the waterline and cored above it, and the 1986 Elite variant relocated its rudders below the waterline in place of the standard boat's transom-hung outboard rudders. The Prout 38 kept a fixed keel that doubled as a grounding plate to protect the rudder when beached, and naval architect Robert Perry noted in his design review that Prout had stuck for years with a rig geometry that stepped the mast on the aft bulkhead of the cabin-house. The Prout 45, credited jointly to David Feltman and Rob Underwood, was hand-laid of solid fiberglass to the waterline with its topsides cored in end-grain balsa and some critical areas Kevlar reinforced, built to Lloyd's ISO 9002/BS 5750 certification and purchasable at varying stages of completion, with an Aero Rig offered as an option. The Escale 39, introduced in 1991, used female-molded monocoque construction with solid fiberglass below the waterline and Airex/Divinycell or balsa coring with Kevlar reinforcement above it; its keels doubled as integral water tanks behind a protective double skin, and it was marketed as effectively unsinkable on the strength of those buoyancy compartments, its sandwich construction and its wood furniture.
That construction record carried weight beyond Prout's own yard. When Lloyd's of London needed construction ratings for catamarans and no data existed, it adopted Prout's own database as the basis, and the same data was used in Japan in the 1980s when maritime regulations changed to accommodate multihulls. A review of the Escale 39 credited Prout with more than 4,000 boats built over 40 years and quoted Multihulls magazine publisher Charles Chiodi calling it "the oldest manufacturer of stock multihulls," adding that over some 10 million miles logged aboard Prout cruising catamarans, there had reportedly been no hull failures or capsizes of any Prout catamaran.
Lines and generations
The cruising line traces from the Quest 31 and 33 in the early 1970s through the Snowgoose 35, which by 1983 had evolved into the Snowgoose 37, and the Snowgoose 37 Elite in 1986. The Escale 39, launched in 1991, was described as descending from that same pedigree — the Quest 31 and 33, the Event 34, the Snowgoose 35 and 37, and the Ocean Ranger 45. The Prout 45 and Prout 38 anchored the yard's final years, the two models retained when the range was cut down in 2001. The wider catalog also ran from the compact Sirocco 26 up to the 50-foot Quasar.
Who Prout is for
Prout appeals to buyers drawn to a genuinely pioneering slice of catamaran history — a yard whose early production boat set precedents that Lloyd's and Japanese regulators both leaned on, and whose beachable, shoal-draft cruising design carried through decades of models. That history comes in distinct chapters: family-era boats built across Prout's independent decades, the compressed range built under Quest ownership around 2000 and 2001, and the Broadblue-built Prestige 38 that continued the Prout 38's hull after the original company was gone. Knowing which chapter a given boat belongs to is part of what buying the brand means.
