RM yachts is the only mass producer of epoxy ply boats in the world. Its boats are therefore unique but also thoroughly entertaining as Sam Jefferson found out
The buying public can be very conservative when it comes to buying a yacht. If it doesn’t have a glassfibre hull, one mast and two triangles of sails, most people aren’t interested. It wasn’t always so. Back in the not so distant past wild-eyed men (yes, it was generally men) with wild hair often had wild ideas about what would make for the perfect yacht. The results were sometimes imperfect but they were always hmmm.. interesting. One of the only real survivors of this era is RM Yachts, which is unique in being the only boatbuilder mass producing yachts in epoxy ply. This company has been on the go building fast cruiser/racers since 1989 which has given it a lot of time to move from the ‘hmm.. interesting’ phase into the ‘hmmm.. this is actually very good’ phase. And yes, it is French – of course it's bloody well French. The country that brought you the Etch a Sketch, the Citroen DS and Alain Bombard – a man prepared to drink his own urine in order to prove his rubber dinghy was good – was always going to be the one that dared to be different.
So before we move on to the RM1380, its latest and largest fast cruiser, it’s worth celebrating the heritage of a company that embraced the fact that wood is good. Martin Lepoutre is the current General Manager at RM, having owned the company between 2002 and 2017 and having now returned to steady the ship since the brand was acquired by the Grand Large Yachting group. “The company was established in 1989,” Lepoutre explains: “The basic concept being to build a boat out of epoxy plywood with good performance, twin (bilge) keels and a metal frame for reinforcement. The first boat was designed by a chap called De Vries who I’ve never heard of but the second boat was a by Marc Lombard and the company has stuck with him ever since.
“I got involved in the company in the 1990s after It had gone bankrupt. Essentially they had a great concept but their problem was that they were marketing the boats as being very basic and, while that might be nice for a certain kind of owner, it’s not very good from a commercial point of view so I knew I needed to reposition the brand.
"I therefore wanted the boats to appeal to the sort of owner who was looking for something a bit different and individual. We stuck with all the basic tenets; performance, epoxy ply, twin keels etc but we just pushed the brand into a different realm in terms of style, fit out and general
