june/july 2016cruisingworld.com69exception, each of these mom-and-
pop enterprises is run by very good
sailors, many of whom started their
company out of the desire to build a
single cruising boat for themselves.
Several of these builders spent years
as full-time cruisers or charter skip-
pers. Most have taken boats across
oceans. Each is a veteran of the Cape
of Storms.A BOATBUILDING COUNTRY
Last December I traveled to Cape
Town and the Eastern Cape to meet
South African boatbuilders, tour their
yards, and sail some catamarans. What
I found surprised me: If the business
models hearken back to an earlier
time, the technology from which many
of the boats are built looks distinctly
forward. Among this group, I saw
some of the lightest, stiff est, highest-
tech sailboat structures available any-
where in the world. If you’re in the
market for a new cruising cat, it’s a trip
I recommend. Knysna Yachts’ Kevin
Fouche recommends it too; he says
he’ll even reimburse the travel costs of
anyone who comes to visit his yard and
places an order for a boat. With the
rand, or ZAR, at historic lows against
the dollar (at press time, U.S. $1 buys
more than 15 rand), that’s an arrange-
ment you might be able to negotiate
with other builders as well.
Cape Town is the undisputed hub
of South African boatbuilding. The
big marine chandleries and materials
suppliers are here, as are the sailmak-
ers and riggers and boatyard crews.
Other boatbuilding pockets lie far-
ther east, past Cape Agulhas — the
true southern point of Africa, and
the boundary between the Atlantic
and Indian oceans — and then along
the Garden Route and Eastern Cape
coastlines, particularly around St.
Francis Bay and Knysna. Die-hard
surfers are drawn to Cape St. Francis
for the “10 million-to-1” waves at Jef-
freys Bay, made legendary by the 1966
documentary The Endless Summer.
Idyllic Knysna, with its vast lagoon
and dramatic oceanfront cliff s, is a
gateway to several renowned big-game
reserves. The drive from Cape Town
is about fi ve hours to Knysna or seven
and a half hours to St. Francis Bay,
and the ride itself, through national
parks and along the coast, is worth
the time. Twice on the N2 national
highway, I had to slow my rental car
to let baboons cross, and a detour to
the penguin colony at Simon’s Town is
one I’ll never forget.Opposite: A Matrix 60 carbon hull
is manufactured using a wet-preg
vacuum layup (top). At St. Francis
Bay, goats lie astern — literally —
of hull number four of the Nexus
60 line, an all-epoxy and vacuum-
bagged cruiser (bottom).BOATBUILDERPROFILESKnysna Yacht Co., Knysna
knysnayachtco.com
Kevin and Rika Fouche cruised the Caribbean
as a family before founding Knysna Yacht Co. in- The company initially built two St. Francis
44s, with tooling Kevin bought from Duncan
Lethbridge. After those two boats, Fouche kept
the hull tooling but created new deck tooling
to add headroom and open the interior space.
The company built 26 Knysna 440s over the
next decade. Then, fi ve years ago, Kevin com-
missioned a larger design from Angelo Lavranos
that would better accommodate the options
that virtually all of his customers specifi ed. From
that tooling, the yard has built seven Knysna
480s and 12 Knysna 500s. “We’re not a pro-
duction yard,” said Kevin. “Ours is a boutique
boat, custom-built. If you want one of our boats,
we can off er a huge amount of customization.”
Knysna Yacht Co. employs 38 boatbuilders at
one yard. They build four boats per year.
Matrix Yachts, Cape Town
matrix-yachts.com
Peter and Fiona Wehrley ran charter boats
together in the 1990s, as did Matrix Yachts’
technical director, Mark Wehrley, their son.
Toward the end of the decade, Peter and Fiona
were looking for something bigger than their
50-foot Mayotte. “We were looking at a Priv-
ilège 65, but Privilège stopped building them,”said Peter. So they returned to South Africa to
build a boat for themselves. A structural engi-
neer and designer with an aviation background,
Peter designed the 76-foot Matrix Silhouette- It didn’t start out that big. “Designing a
boat takes time,” said Peter, “sitting in it at
night and studying the areas and refi ning them.”
Now, 15 years later, the Wehrleys are still build-
get some rest, leaving clear instruc-
tions to stay in close to shore and out
of the current. When he came back on
deck a couple of hours later, he knew
straightaway what had happened, and
it didn’t take long for conditions to de-
teriorate. “The seas were four stories
tall,” Duncan told me, “and the top
two stories were collapsing.” They’d
strayed into the current. For the next
many hours, he said, he had to use ev-
ery steering skill he’d learned sailing
Hobie Cats through the beach surf in
Jeff reys Bay to stay upright and sailing
— except now he was doing it at sea in
a 12-ton catamaran.
Duncan founded St. Francis Marine
in 1988, and he stands as a godfather
of today’s South African boatbuilders.
When St. Francis shifted production
from 44-footers to 50-footers in the
early 2000s, Duncan sold his tooling
for the 44s to Kevin Fouche, who
used it to start Knysna Yacht Co.
Rudi Pretorius ordered a Knysna 440
for his family and loved the build pro-
cess so much that fi ve years later he
became a boatbuilder himself, start-
ing Maverick Yachts in 2007. Mean-
while Kevin’s neighbors at Vision
Yachts built a 45-foot cat from tool-
ing created by Peter Wehrley at
Matrix Yachts. In fact, the more you
talk with South African boatbuilders
— the Paarman brothers at Nexus
Yachts, Tim van der Steene at Tag
Yachts, Mark Delaney at Two Oceans
Marine Manufacturing — the more
you understand that the whole indus-
try is a network of interconnected
relationships, both within companies
and between them.
Collectively, South Africa pro-
duces 30 percent of all the cruising
multi hulls in the world, second only
to France. Yet the business models
prevailing in the two countries could
hardly be more diff erent. With the
exception of Robertson and Caine,
which will build 175 boats this year at
four separate plants near Cape Town,
the South African builders produce
just a handful of yachts each: four
boats, eight boats, 12 boats a year.
These are typically family businesses
operating not as high-output facto-
ries but as artisan shops. And withoutKnysna 500Matrix ExplorerCOURTESY OF THE MANUFACTURER; TIM MURPHY (TOP)