Seeing the materials that go into the hull of a 40ft yacht flat-packed and stacked on a single large pallet is an arresting sight (see page 56). Yet that’s exactly what happens at RM Yachts in La Rochelle, a well-known French boatbuilder that has been constructing state-of-the-art plywood yachts for more than 30 years.
Why build boats from plywood these days? “It’s very lightweight but also very stiff, which is good for performance and for sailing qualities,” RM’s Léa Laurent told me when I visited the factory during the La Rochelle boat show. “It’s also a flexible, artisanal kind of production and more environmentally friendly than fibreglass.”
Laurent says almost all RM clients understand the advantages of the construction method “before they come to us.” However, that’s not always the case in the wider boat-owning community, perhaps because the huge benefits of epoxy coatings and sheathing in extending the longevity of the structure are not fully appreciated.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, a plywood boat was more likely to be regarded as a liability that required lots of maintenance to prevent what was seen as the inevitability of rot
