Tofinou sailboats: a small La Rochelle yard's daysailer line, traced back to one recovered hull
Every Tofinou traces to a single wooden dayboat: a boat naval architect Edmond Merle designed in 1928 for a client named Édouard Menuteau. Tofinou's own history page frames what happened to that boat as legend — found on a sandbank, the story goes, and the discovery that inspired the founders to build a range around it. The fuller account, from Yachting World's history of the brand, is more concrete: in 1986, Bertrand Danglade recovered the hull, by then badly deteriorated, from a mudflat on the Île de Ré, and decided with his friend Philippe Joubert to mold a polyester replica of it. The mold produced 230 Tofinou 7s, a success that launched the yard the pair founded the following year — Latitude 46 — at St Martin de Ré, on the island's namesake 46th parallel; its workshops now sit on the mainland side of the bridge to La Rochelle. The range's name honors a Benin tribe the builder translates as "people of the sea" (Yachting World renders the same tribe, from Lake Nokoué, as "Men of the water"). Nearly four decades on, Latitude 46 remains a modest-size yard, producing no more than 20 boats a year, even as its Tofinou range has grown to span models from the founding 7 up through the 52-foot 16.
Origins and ownership
Financial trouble eventually reached the yard the Joubert family and Danglade founded. In 2015, the commercial court of La Rochelle ruled that Latitude 46 would pass to the Experton-Revollier group — an Isère-based company with prior interests in construction, tooling, and automotive work that had entered the nautical industry in 2011. Five other parties had shown interest in the takeover, including Fora Marine's RM Yachts, Dufour Yachts, Black Pepper, and a Swiss investor, but the court judged Experton-Revollier's plan the most financially stable. The deal aligned Latitude 46 with the group's other yacht brand, Wauquiez, based near Tourcoing by the English Channel rather than Latitude 46's Atlantic-coast home; Wauquiez said at the time that the pairing would help it gain an Atlantic foothold, while Latitude 46 would draw on Wauquiez's Port Grimaud base to grow in the Mediterranean. Latitude 46 kept its existing director and its full La Rochelle team through the transition. In September 2021, the industrial group EXEL Industries announced it had acquired Wauquiez, Rhéa-Marine, and Tofinou together from Experton-Revollier, a combined operation across three French sites — Neuville-en-Ferrain, La Rochelle, and Port Camargue.
The designers
Two separate design lines run through the range, carried by two men who happen to share a surname. Philippe Joubert was Danglade's partner in molding that first Tofinou 7 — the act that founded the yard. Michel Joubert, working with his partner Bernard Nivelt, was the naval architect behind the range's classic core: the Tofinou 8, 9.5, 10, 12, and 16. When Michel Joubert died, naval architect Michele Molino took over the range's design, beginning with the Tofinou 9.7; Peugeot Design Lab joined that project too, bringing an automotive-world eye to the boat's deck and cockpit.
Construction through the eras
The identity Latitude 46 built from that first mold has largely held. The builder describes its work as rooted in a maritime tradition of varnish and mahogany, paired with modern woodworking and composite techniques, and it states that all of its manufacturing takes place in France, built from a material palette of teak, mahogany, stainless steel, and carbon. On the original Tofinou 7, that meant a fiberglass hull, teak decks, and varnished mahogany trim durable enough that Practical Boat Owner found an eight-year-old example whose trim hadn't needed touching up since the boat was built. The Tofinou 9.7 marked a visible break from that formula: Yachting World reported that its coamings and coachroof moved from solid mahogany to veneer-covered composite, a change from earlier models in the range. The yard's director framed the shift as more than material — giving the 9.7 "slightly steeper and more angular lines" than older Tofinous modernized the boat's aesthetic as much as its build.
Lines and generations
Latitude 46 has never let a new model retire an old one. As the yard puts it, new Tofinous "enlarge the family" rather than replace their elders, each carrying its own personality within the same hand-made tradition — which is how a yard building no more than 20 boats a year has ended up with a lineup running from the 23-foot 7 through the 52-foot 16, with the 8, 9.5, 10 C, 12, and 7.9 filling out the range between them. The newest addition, the 9.7, began with a specific request: two owners of Tofinou 8s wanted rigorously one-design boats so they could race each other on equal terms. Latitude 46 unveiled the result at the 2019 La Rochelle boat show.
Who Tofinou is for
Tofinou's own history page quotes sailor Éric Tabarly's observation that beautiful boats generally sail well, and the range is built for buyers who want that proposition tested in daysailer form: a small, hand-finished French yard where each new model has added to a family rather than superseded it, still built from the varnish-and-mahogany tradition its founders started with in 1987.
