Oyster Yachts will build a catamaran for the first time. The C60, a 19-metre cat drawn by Berret-Racoupeau of La Rochelle, was unveiled at the Cannes Yachting Festival this week. It will not be built in Britain. Chief executive Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke told Marine Industry News the boat will be built "probably in France," and that price, delivery and the choice of yard are still open.
Oyster has spent more than fifty years building monohulls for people who sail around the world. Nineteen metres of catamaran is a bigger step than the length suggests. The company is following its own customers onto two hulls.
The catamaran has been under discussion since 2022
Richard Hadida, Oyster's chairman and owner, has wanted to build a catamaran since 2022. He put the plan to Torsten Müller-Ötvös, the former Rolls-Royce chief executive who joined Oyster as strategic adviser in May 2025, and was turned down. Müller-Ötvös wanted the house in order first, while the company worked through large deliveries and the rest of the business. The go-ahead came only after Zimmermann Zschocke was appointed chief executive in September 2025. At Cannes, Hadida said he was delighted to see his dream coming true.
The decision rests on more than a year of market research among current, former and prospective owners. Oyster owners tend to stay with the brand for decades, and the company has watched some of them leave for multihulls as their families grew and their appetite for demanding passages shrank. "We have seen some owners move towards multihulls as their lives and ambitions have changed," Zimmermann Zschocke said in the launch statement.
Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke, chief executive, Oyster Yachts:“When you look at owners, they want to have stability, they want to have space and they want to have the connections between interior and exterior.
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Sixty feet of catamaran equals eighty feet of monohull
The brief had three parts: the boat must look like an Oyster, it must be able to explore, and it must balance space against genuine bluewater ability. "We feel there's no one else but us who can do that," Zimmermann Zschocke says.
The case for sixty feet is a volume argument. "A sixty-foot catamaran is a bit like an eighty-foot monohull, give or take," he says. "And that sixty feet, for us, is a sweet spot." The C60 has 110 square metres of living space, a figure an owner of an Oyster 825 would recognise. On a long passage, he adds, "even if you're on a hundred-foot boat, the square metre shrinks by every week, by every month you are sailing, because the space also generates constraints."
The layout puts an owner's cabin and up to three guest cabins with en-suite heads in the hulls, with crew space forward. The owner's suite gets the triple Seascape windows Oyster uses on its monohulls and opens straight onto the aft deck. There is a bar on the aft deck, a sunken lounge on the foredeck and a flybridge above. Two fold-down platforms on either side open up what the company calls a huge terrace at anchor, with a central lift for the tender between them. Berret-Racoupeau's drawings show two galley options, up in the saloon or down in one of the hulls.
Among the yacht's key qualities Zimmermann Zschocke lists the fundamentals: a low superstructure, trampolines forward and a lot of clearance. Bridge-deck clearance is up to a metre. "The whole setup will be, from a freeboard point of view, safe and easy to travel in," he says. Olivier Racoupeau describes the C60 as "conceived first and foremost as a true bluewater yacht" that can cross oceans with confidence.
Why a British yard cannot build it at home
Oyster consolidated its manufacturing this year at a new centre in Wroxham, in the Norfolk Broads, after announcing in May 2026 that production at its Southampton yard would stop by the end of the year. Wroxham is far from the coast, and a hull 9.35 metres wide is not a load anyone wants to drive to the sea.
Stefan Zimmermann Zschocke, chief executive, Oyster Yachts:“As you can imagine, the beam and transporting it by the street might not be easy. Therefore, the catamaran project will be steered by the Oyster team, but it will not be built in the UK, probably in France.
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France is also where the expertise is. Berret-Racoupeau sits in La Rochelle, at the centre of the French catamaran industry, and Zimmermann Zschocke reckons "ninety per cent or even more of all catamarans are coming from France." A cat has to go in the water where it is built and be handed to the customer there. "France for us is very easy because we just take the ferry," he says. He calls it a return to the business model of Oyster's founder Richard Matthews, who subcontracted most of his yachts.
Engineering, supply chain, quality control and logistics stay with Southampton; where the joinery will be done is still undecided. "There will still be a lot of employment because of that," he says. The specific French yard has not been named, and the company says it still has to settle technical questions, delivery and price with Berret-Racoupeau before it can.
What Oyster announced in Cannes is an intention with a set of drawings, and the company says so itself. There is no price, no delivery date and no named builder. Behind that intention sit more than a year of conversations with long-standing clients, and one yacht owner's conviction that this is exactly what is needed.
Three weeks after the capsize
On 21 August the Oyster 825 Viva La Vida capsized and sank during Hamilton Island Race Week in Queensland after suffering severe keel damage. The race committee confirmed she was sailing downwind in 20 knots when she hit a charted rock, and the mayday came 2.7 miles further on. All ten people on board got off. The investigation is still open, and Zimmermann Zschocke says Oyster is "overachieving that ISO norm." He has heard the owners are looking at brokerage Oysters to continue with the World Rally.
That is the context in which a monohull yard is asking its customers to trust it with a platform it has never built, at a yard it has not yet chosen. The Oyster name has been enough for fifty years of monohulls. The C60 will find out whether it carries across the beam.
