At the 2026 Sail America Industry Conference, Aaron Porter, editor of Professional BoatBuilder magazine, sat down with the core team behind Ouzel — the 95-foot wood-composite sailing yacht recently launched by Rockport Marine in Rockport, Maine.
Click to watch the full discussion video:
The discussion brought together Sam Temple of Rockport Marine and Tom Degrémont of Langan Design Partners, and highlighted the broad and successful collaboration between MCM Newport, Mark Whiteley Design, and a large network of fabricators, engineers, suppliers, and craftspeople from across New England and beyond.
As Porter notes at the outset, projects of this scale are high-stakes endeavors — the kind capable of overwhelming even experienced yards if mishandled. What follows is an unusually candid look at how a New England boatyard and an experienced international team navigated the technical, logistical, and human challenges of building a modern custom superyacht.
Topics covered include:
- How Project Ouzel began and the team was assembled
- Developing the owner’s design brief and long-range cruising goals
- Balancing performance, comfort, and simplicity
- The importance of communication and teamwork in managing a highly complex custom build
- Why the team chose wood-composite construction
- Keel studies, draft tradeoffs, and systems planning
- Building teams with hybrid skill and knowledge bases necessary for the project
- How modern boatbuilding and the modern boatbuilder has evolved
- Problem-solving through mockups, prototyping, and feedback
- Finding the right partners in New England and across the globe
Quotes
“It’s a scale of project that can sink a yard unlucky enough to fumble it.”
— Aaron Porter, Professional BoatBuilder
“You don’t need to put carbon over the whole hull, but you gain significantly in weight and space by using it where we chose to use it.”
— Tom Degrémont, Langan Design Partners
“The modern boatbuilder is a little different than they used to be.”
— Sam Temple, Rockport Marine
Project Team
- Builder: Rockport Marine
- Naval Architecture: Langan Design Partners
- Project Management: MCM Newport
- Interior Design: Mark Whiteley Design