Oyster

Oyster has built deck-saloon ocean cruisers in England since 1973 — a yard founded by Richard Matthews that turned a single idea, the glazed saloon you can see the horizon from, into a genre and a club. The boats were moulded and fitted out across a network of Norfolk yards under Oyster’s supervision; the company keeps a file on every hull it has ever built, and its owners circumnavigate in organised fleets: the Oyster World Rally leaves every few years, and in 2023 the hundredth Oyster completed a lap of the planet.

The company’s history is more turbulent than its boats: sold by its founder in 2008, sold again in 2012, in administration by February 2018 and rescued a month later by Richard Hadida. Through all of it, the used fleet — and the community around it — kept sailing.