Amel

Amel builds ocean cruisers in La Rochelle, and has done since 1965 — a yard founded by Henri Amel, a designer blinded in the war who conceived his boats not as yachts but as "integrated cruising systems": everything proprietary, everything electric, everything workable by a couple from the centre cockpit. Dying in 2005, four days short of his 92nd birthday, he handed 12,000 of the company's 13,000 shares to his employees. The yard still belongs to the people who build the boats.

Roughly five hundred Super Maramus made Amel the most numerous serious ocean cruiser of its class and the default answer to "what should a couple sail around the world" — a status lately amplified by SV Delos, the world's biggest sailing channel, which sails one. In 2017 the yard staged a quiet revolution with the Amel 50, its first sloop in twenty years; the age of the ketches is over, and the used market knows it.