You heard it here first: Aquila is making sailboats. SAIL editor-in-chief Lydia Mullan recently traveled down to their headquarters in Clearwater, Florida an exclusive first look at the plans for a 50-footer and a conversation with the Raas family about the new direction that the company is branching out into.
It’s not often that you hear about a major powerboat manufacturer making inroads in the sailing space. Usually, it goes the other way around. Aquila founder Lex Raas, however, has rarely gone the traditional route.
The family-run company was founded in 2012 and is now managed by his sons Jean and Alain. They offered SAIL an exclusive first look at the 50-footer that will debut in 2026 and launch Aquila’s lineup of sailing cats.
Before you get too excited that the dark side has seen the light, romanced by the graceful lines and quiet range of a sailboat, it’s worth knowing the Raas family has always been sailors, and the rest of their executive team for the project have sailing backgrounds too. In fact, sailing is buried somewhere deep in Aquila’s DNA, having been the thing that started Lex on the path towards catamarans in the first place. In the 80s, when he worked for The Moorings, the company was thinking about phasing sailing cats out of charter because people weren’t enjoying them.
“I said, ‘I want to do a survey on everybody that’s taken out [a catamaran.] I want to understand if that’s true.’ ” Lex recalls. “And fundamentally, customers loved the idea of the catamaran because of the stability. Their friends were happy, but the galley was down below, the sail controls are at the back end, and the engines were tiny so they couldn’t motor upwind. So, I took all that in and said to the exec team, ‘I think we should not be getting out of sailing cats.’ They decided to get out of sailing cats anyway.”
With a bit of a redesign, though, he knew they could work, and armed with his gathered intel, he began looking for a builder. He was turned down everywhere until finally he asked a friend back home in South Africa—John Robertson of Robertson and Caine. One ultimatum from Raas later, The Moorings had ordered 17 boats and Leopard was born.
He’d later move on from the charter world to found Aquila, focusing on powercats for the next 10 or so years. But recently the Raas family decided to return to those sailing roots.
“I do believe the sailing audience and the power boating audience are quite different,” says Alain. “You’ve got one client that’s happy going 10 knots or so another that wants to go 20 plus knots, so it’s two very different thought processes on how they want to get from point A to point B. But holistically all of our clients have the same ambition, which is getting out on the water with friends and family. At the end of the day we all just want to be out on the water and have as much enjoyment in that as we can.”
So what does their vision for a sailing cat look like? It’s a comfortable, stylish cruiser with a recognizably Aquila profile and amenities to spare.
“We know that the performance cat is a different breed to the cruising cat,” Lex says. “The desires of the owners are quite different, and we don’t claim to be a high performance sailing catamaran, but we’re right in the middle of the production market.” They expect some will go into charter while others will be privately owned.
“For the layouts on the 50 in particular, we wanted to make sure we maximized the cabin space,” says Jean who had a lead role in designing the boat. “We planned the electrical system to make more room, so what we were able to fit is either a four cabin, a five cabin, or a six cabin version. But still it’s got to have a good air conditioning system and a full size refrigerator because everybody likes that.”
“Jean’s job is getting harder and harder because everyone wants their boat to be like their home now,” Alain quips. “It’s a really unique design where each cabin has its own access so you don’t even need to share a hallway with another cabin.”
Though the boat won’t make it to any shows this year, we’ll certainly see it on the Top 10 Best Boats nominee list next October.
For more on Aquila, visit aquilaboats.com.
