44′ Beneteau Swift Trawler

Source: Passagemaker Magazine, Story By John Wooldridge

Innnovation and competition are constants of this global builder.

LAST SPRING, I found myself standing about halfway across Le Gois, a 2.6-mile paved-over sandbank connecting the mainland of France with Ile-de-Noirmoutier, an island just off the western coast. This ancient pathway was for centuries the only means of foot and cart traffic to the island, which thrived as home to those who fished the Bay of Biscay, as well as those who farmed the interior lands. Along the way, several tall structures looking very much like outposts for guards sprouted from the ocean’s floor, but in fact, they were life-saving structures for those who misjudged the fast-rising tides that covered Le Gois with up to 20 feet of water. Standing in the middle of the road, I watched with fascination as the rising water rapidly encroached closer and closer to the edges of the pavement, and was reminded that those who made their living on the waters of the challenging Atlantic required sturdy, well-made vessels.

I was invited to France by Laurent Fabre, vice president of sales and marketing, and Maryline O’Shea, marketing director, both from Beneteau Group Powerboat America, to see for myself how and where Swift Trawlers were fabricated, and to test the recently launched Swift Trawler 44. Armed with good local knowledge and a very up-to-date tide table, O’Shea planned our passage across Le Gois at just the right time, a subtle environmental aside on our way to the Beneteau facility on the northwest coast of Ile-de-Noirmoutier where the Swift Trawler 44 and 52 are constructed. Unfortunately, our schedule did not allow us to stop in the coastal town of Saint-Gilles just across the river from Croix-de-Vie, only an hour south, where Benjamin Beneteau founded his family boatyard in 1884.

Just the year before, Benjamin Beneteau had been awarded a degree in naval architecture. Serving on various ships, and having an opportunity to inspect others including the fast, lighter-built English vessels of that era, he decided that there was a better way to design and build the next generation of working vessels so that they were faster to the fishing grounds, and faster to market. This was the beginning of the innovative and competitive nature of the Beneteau family boatbuilding philosophy. Watching the transition of vessels from sail-only to sail and power, Benjamin Beneteau designed his first tuna fishing boat with sail and an engine in 1912.

It should come as no surprise that, like the then-radical shift to engines in four-wheel transportation, engines aboard boats were greeted by some with derision. History tells us that, on returning from the fishing grounds aboard one of his sail-and-power designs, people from the sardine and tuna canneries threw rocks at the vessel from the shoreline, fearing pollution of the catch and a loss of their jobs. Benjamin Beneteau was hardly deterred. Historical records show the boatyard was very busy in the intervening years, with multiple hulls under construction. Benjamin Beneteau prospered and, when he died in 1928, passed his legacy to his son Andre and daughter-in-law Georgina, both 21 years of age.

The popularity of the Beneteau family wood fishing boats increased rapidly, creating a demanding seven-day-per-week schedule until the early 1960s. Like his father before him, Andre Beneteau understood the changes that were to come with advanced new materials and in 1962, aided by his children Andre and Annette, he created the first fiberglass fishing boats that combined strength and longevity for those working the Atlantic fisheries. In 1964, he handed control of the family boatyard to his two children. Not long thereafter, Annette married Louis-Claude Roux and, along with her brother Andre, began to move the company into the realm of pleasure cruising. Fisher-cruiser sailboats became much in demand, and the Beneteau Family boatyard, on the leading edge of design and construction, was prepared for an entirely new audience.

In 1965, Andre Beneteau designed a fishing/excursion open sailboat, a vessel that caught the imagination of a growing sector of the boating audience who wanted a multi-purpose boat to fill leisure time on weekends. In 1973, his first ketch-rigged design helped fuel the growing trend to distance cruising under sail. In 1977, Andre Mauric was the first independent naval architect to collaborate with the company on sailboat designs, paving the way for the likes of German Frers, Bruce Farr, and Philippe Briand. But 1977 was also the year that the Andre Beneteau-designed Antares 7.50 fishing/cruising boat debuted, solidifying the Beneteau name as a leader in the rapidly expanding global recreational powerboat market.

For 2002, the Antares 13.80 was the flagship of that popular Euro-styled model line, the largest boat in the fleet of Beneteau luxury offshore power cruisers. However, it was the introduction of the Michel Joubert-and-Bernard Nivelt-designed Swift Trawler 42 in 2003, with its classical yet contemporary lines and its emphasis on a wide range of efficient power under way, that marked a new direction for the offshore cruiser market. The characteristic Beneteau attention to light but strong construction and finishing details, in a boat that was designed for cruising couples or families who wanted to spend more than just a weekend on the water, made the new 42 worthy of notice.

When the company debuted the sleek Monte Carlo 37, with its innovative “Air-Step” hull, in 2006, one might have been persuaded to think that the Swift Trawler line had taken a back seat in the new model development process. Far from it. That thought was put to rest with the introduction of the Swift Trawler 52 in 2008, and the Swift Trawler 34 in 2010. In the span of seven years, the trawler line grew quickly to encompass owners who were just getting into the cruising lifestyle, as well as those experienced owners who prized more livability and luxury than was possible in the low- to mid-40-foot range. Always looking for improvements that increased the comfort and efficiency of their entire model line, Groupe Beneteau launched the Swift Trawler 44, with numerous interior and functional advances, in 2011.

Building Beneteau: The Times, Methods, And Materials Have Changed Dramatically

When Benjamin Beneteau founded his first boatyard in 1884, he could hardly have imagined that his passion for boatbuilding would continue through three generations, or grow to an enterprise employing some 2,500 employees. Nor could he have foreseen the growth of his company, one that would become a global leader in the manufacture of production fiberglass boats, setting rigorous standards for quality and innovation, and meeting the demands of a public lured by the ancient call of the sea. Today, Groupe Beneteau builds six lines of powerboats and four lines of sailboats in factories in 10 locations in France, plus another in Marion, South Carolina. Currently, there is another factory under construction in Brazil, to serve the fast-developing South American market. And it all started because one man dared to innovate, to build hulls that were designed for sail and power.

“All along the French coast in the late 1800s, from Brittany to the Spanish border, there were remote villages and numerous small boatyards making sailing boats for fishermen that would go out for a week or two at a time,” said Laurent Fabre. “They were supported by small family businesses like sailmakers, rope makers, and canneries that prepared the catch for shipment to markets all over France. Most shipyards were constantly struggling to stay in business, because most fishermen could barely afford to keep a boat in working condition.

“Benjamin Beneteau’s granddaughter, Madame Annette Roux, still remembers going into the forest with him where he would choose the trees he wanted, some with natural curves for the frames, some with long straight trunks for planks. These trees would not be used for many months, but this was the beginning of the tradition of selecting the materials and preparing to build the lightest, strongest boats that would get fishermen and their catch to market days faster. His strong entrepreneurial drive led him to install the first inboards with shafts and propellers, creating a relationship between power in boats and the Beneteau name. That spirit still exists in Groupe Beneteau, always trying new things, always building on existing technologies and exploring new ones to improve our boats.”

Fabre told me that Benjamin Beneteau’s original drawings, dating from his years studying naval architecture, are still displayed in the company’s headquarters. I have seen them, and like all naval architecture, the lines are part engineering, and part art. Fabre recalled watching Patrick Tableau, co-inventor of Groupe Beneteau’s patented Air-Step design for fast planing boats, along with Maud Tronquez and Remi Laval-Jeantet, draw a hull freehand on a computer tablet as he might have on paper not too many years ago. But these days, the lines are captured digitally, and transformed into a structure by a staff of house designers and engineers. Beginning in the early 1990s, the process became much more precise with the use of computer-aided design (CAD) and three-dimensional modeling. And yet, it is still an art, still the product of a mind that understands the mission of the boat.

“When Benjamin Beneteau drew his designs to be stronger, to carry more fish, to accommodate an engine, he was doing so with the understanding that they would be used on one of the most difficult bodies of water in the world, the Bay of Biscay,” Fabre said. “The same holds true today. We test our boats on those same demanding waters, in all kinds of conditions—some of them not so pleasant. So when a customer asks about this or that rating, wanting to know if our boats will make it across San Francisco Bay or the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas, we reply in the affirmative because we know our boats are designed and built for people who want to go to sea.”

Benjamin Beneteau would hardly recognize the way boats are built of fiberglass these days. Gone are the massive sheds with braced frames ready for planking. One boat might take a year or more to complete. These days, digital design information is used to build models to test and photograph in water tanks at Ecole Centrale de Nantes, and to drive computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines that can cut hundreds of parts from plywood all precisely the same in shape and size.

One of the more fascinating aspects of boat production encompasses fast prototyping and precision plug making. When a new boat hull is desired at Beneteau, large foam blocks, greater than the volume of the plug required to make the final mold, are solidly glued together on a stable reference platform and rolled into a room housing a five-axis router. Digital design information is fed into the computer controlling the router arm and head, and the machine begins to remove layers of foam at precisely the right angle and depth, measured on the Cartesian coordinate system (X, Y, Z) to create the three-dimensional plug.

As the process progresses, the machine will select different bits to remove material in finer and finer detail, until the plug, be it a hull, liner, deck and house, or other small parts, is finished to a level that is accurate to the drawn digital shape in terms of thousandths of an inch. If you wondered why a three-axis model requires a five-axis router, consider the spaces that are hollowed out of a deck mold—lockers, overhangs, under-gunwale stowage—which would not exist unless the CNC machine can work in both directions of a given axis.

The ability to replicate exact copies at precisely the dimensions required means that the parts made from the molds taken from these plugs will always be the same size and shape, and with careful lamination the same weight, and will not require extra man-hours to modify so that they all fit together as the naval architects and engineers envisioned. In terms of performance, it is hard to overstate the importance of precisely placed and shaped keels, lifting or spray strakes, or the angle of a bow entry and how they will all affect the safe handling and efficient operation of a boat at speed through the water.

Next month, I’ll take you on an in-depth tour of the factories I visited last spring, to learn how Groupe Beneteau optimizes the materials, preparation, and manufacturing processes to build their sailboats and powerboats. The fact that the company’s latest designs are affordable, reliable, and desirable is a direct result of the culture of its employees, a culture you can trace back over 124 years to a young pioneering Frenchman who embraced an innovative approach to boatbuilding.