Voyage sailboats: a small South African yard built on charter-boat DNA
Voyage Yachts was founded in 1994 by Tom and Deirdre Lubbe together with Ian and Jo Stopforth, beginning with a single Simonis-designed catamaran, the Voyage 400. From nearly the start, the brand's growth ran through the charter trade rather than around it: a sister charter operation, launched within the company's first year, shaped decades of production, and the yard has remained a small, hands-on builder rather than a high-volume production house. Three decades on, it has built close to 200 catamarans, moving from hand-laid, bagged-core hulls to a lighter, infused, part-electric construction along the way.
Origins and ownership
The founding story is tied to Robin Downing, a South African sailor who in 1994 sailed his 54-foot custom racer/cruiser Sovereign from Durban to Cape Town and on to the Cayman Islands. In Cape Town he met the Lubbes and the Stopforths and bought a hull, deck, and bulkhead that he outfitted into his own 40-foot catamaran, Scubadu. Durban friends Terry and Jacqui Weddell bought a second Voyage 400, naming it 40 Something, and Voyage Yachts was formally established when Kay Oldenburg was appointed the company's boat builder, with the Lubbes serving as directors and owners; Oldenburg has built the yard's catamarans ever since.
Downing bought the first production Voyage 400 and relocated his family to Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, to launch Voyage Charters at Frenchman's Cay; Voyage Yachts established Voyage Charters there as a sister company in 1995. That charter arm grew into a meaningful business in its own right — by 2017 it ran roughly 30 boats around the BVI alongside cruising boats sold outside the charter program — and survived Hurricane Irma, which decimated the fleet, before the Downing family rebuilt it with help from their children.
Ownership of the yard itself shifted gradually. In 2013, Robin Downing bought out Ian and Jo Stopforth's shares in Voyage Yachts, and in 2016 master boat builder Kay Oldenburg acquired a shareholding of his own. Tom Lubbe has remained managing director throughout; in 2025, in the company's third decade of production, Voyage moved into a new, purpose-built production facility.
The designers
Alexander Simonis drew Voyage's earliest boats, from the founding 400 through the 440, credited jointly with Voyage Yachts on the latter. As the range moved toward larger, more electrified boats, naval architect Phil Southwell partnered with Voyage Yachts on the 590, working from a brief Robin Downing set himself.
Construction through the eras
The 440 was hand-laid with bagged-core construction and a double-redundant hull-to-deck joint; the Cruising World judges who awarded it Boat of the Year praised its glasswork and called its structure as tight as a good guitar body. By the mid-2010s the 480 carried foam coring through its hulls, deck, and cockpit bimini, along with cored furniture and doors to save weight, and in 2016 it became the first Voyage to carry a hybrid-electric propulsion system.
The 590 pushed construction further: a hand-laid, three-piece hull mold paired with a separate deck mold, its structural grid, hull, and deck all foam-cored and vacuum-bagged, built around a closed-cell PVC foam core and multiple layers of quadraxial glass roving. Voyage has said its entire range is now infused in a three-step process meant to produce a notably lighter product than its older, heavier charter-spec boats, and the 590 is offered as a dedicated all-electric boat or a hybrid pairing a diesel engine with Bellmarine electric generators and solar panels. The newer 510 carries that direction forward with hand-laid, infusion-assisted construction in multiple layers of quadraxial glass fabric, bulkheads tabbed to hull, deck, and coachroof, forward watertight compartments, and an anti-osmotic epoxy coating below the waterline — construction Cruising World called lightweight but robust, with an emphasis on strength and system integration.
Lines and generations
The lineup grew steadily out of that first 400: by 1996 Voyage had added the 500 and was running two production lines, and in 2001 the 440 became the first catamaran to win Cruising World's Overall Boat of the Year award, at the Annapolis show. The 580 followed with a Cruising World catamaran honor of its own in the early 2000s, and the range later grew to include the Voyage DC 45 day-charter boat, meant to strengthen Voyage Charters' position as a premium provider. The 590 carried the hybrid-electric option forward and was later named Cruising World's Charter Boat of the Year, in 2022; it was joined in 2025 by the new 510, nominated for the 2026 Multihull of the Year Awards in the Sail 45-to-55-foot category.
Who Voyage is for
Multihulls World has described Voyage as producing large blue-water catamarans in small production runs, and the yard's own account puts its output at close to 200 catamarans built across three decades, with a staff of around 50 turning out five or six boats a year. Combined with its roots in Caribbean charter operations, that scale points Voyage toward buyers looking for a boutique, charter-tested builder rather than a high-volume production yard.
