The Nautitech 48 was the last yacht Marc Lombard designed prior to his premature death. Sam Jeffersondiscovered that it was a fitting tribute to his genius
The world of multihulls has long been an esoteric one and the fact that it is now a multi million pound industry doesn’t mean that certain oddities and prejudices do not remain. One of the most troubling for many manufacturers has been the sharp divide between those catamarans with daggerboards – which are generally labelled performance cruisers and those without – which are generally sneered at by those who have daggerboards. This is because many years ago, certain manufacturers thought nothing of building comfortable cruising catamarans that went sideways as fast as they went forward. The reason manufacturers eschewed daggerboards is because they were expensive to fit and took up a bit of interior volume. The result was a certain snobbery that persists to this day.
One manufacturer which has endeavoured more than most to break down this perception is Nautitech who took it upon itself to build catamarans without daggerboards but with a pleasing level of performance and weatherliness thanks to stub keels, narrower hull lines and more direct helms set outboard. This French company started life as far back as 1994 as part of the Dufour Yachts Group. Yet it was in 2011 when the boatbuilder teamed up with designer Marc Lombard that things started to take off; the concept of a fast, daggerboard-free performance cruiser really came together and the marque started to carve a real niche in the market.
Lombard, who was there in the 1980s when multihull racing gained lift off, developed a close bond with the Nautitech brand which was sealed when he took ownership of a Nautitech Open 40 which he kept in the Caribbean. This gave him a passion and understanding of the brand. Many of his ideas to improve that design are embodied in the Nautitech 48 Open.
So what have we here? Well, it’s a cruising catamaran first and foremost so it needs to be comfortable and spacious. At the same time the performance needs to be a cut above other mass production rivals. To achieve this, weight has been kept to a minimum, with vacuum infused hull construction and infused sandwich bulkheads employed. This has kept the displacement down to a respectable 13,500kg. Combine that with slim hulls and you have a recipe for speed.
The keels are a key feature – both in keeping the cost down by eschewing daggerboards but also keeping upwind performance decent by providing
