Rockport Marine's 29m Ouzel Shows the US Still Builds Superyachts

What Ouzel Is, and Why the Build Matters

Ouzel is a 29-metre (95-foot) custom sloop built by Rockport Marine in Rockport, Maine, the largest yacht the yard has ever constructed. She was launched in November 2025, completed sea trials in Penobscot Bay in July 2026, and by August was making her first bluewater passages toward Canada ahead of an Atlantic crossing. The scale matters as much as the yacht: it is rare for a yard outside Northern Europe, New Zealand or a handful of Italian custom houses to deliver a fully bespoke sailing yacht at this size, and Rockport Marine had never built anything this large before.

The team behind her is deliberately small. Langan Design Partners, a Newport naval architecture practice, drew the hull and rig; Mark Whiteley Design, a British studio, did the interior; and Marine Construction Management (MCM), also of Newport, ran the project on the owners' behalf. Three of the four parties are New England firms, which the owners treated as a selling point rather than a compromise. No production line, dealer network or brokerage machinery stands behind this yacht - everything on her was decided by four named people and the owners directly.

The Brief: A Modern Pilothouse Cutter for High Latitudes

The owners, previous owners of a 20-metre Baltic Yachts build, wanted a modern interpretation of a classic pilothouse cutter that could look right, sail well, and be self-sufficient far from a marina. Langan Design Partners' late founder, Bill Langan, had designed their previous boat, and the practice's current partner Tom Degremont took the brief from an initial 28.3-metre (93-foot) hull to the finished 28.96 metres after the owners approved adding two feet of length for cockpit and technical space in what Degremont says was a ten-minute decision. 'Decisions were made for the good of the project, not for arbitrary reasons,' he said of the process.

The hull is cold-molded Douglas fir and western red cedar over a carbon-fibre structure, with a foam-cored, plywood-fibreglass deck - a lighter, less heavily framed build than a traditional plank-on-frame wooden yacht, chosen for weight saving without giving up the look of a wood boat. Doyle Sails cut a sailplan of more than 4,500 square feet (418 square metres) upwind: mainsail, a high-cut Yankee jib and staysail, plus a Code Zero for off-wind work. Beam is 6.25 metres (20 feet 6 inches) and draft is given as 3.66 metres (12 feet) on Rockport Marine's own spec sheet and rounded to 3.7 metres in BOAT International's report - the same figure, not a discrepancy. A single 400hp diesel supplies auxiliary power.

How She Performed on Sea Trials

Ouzel reached cruising speeds above 12 knots in a modest breeze during her formal July sea trials in Penobscot Bay, and a Megayacht News journalist who took the helm in August recorded the yacht making 4 knots in only light, patchy puffs once her mainsail, Genoa and staysail were set and the 400hp engine was shut down entirely. Rockport Marine president Sam Temple, a third-generation boatbuilder, reported a short punch list of 'nonconformities' after trials, and design partner Tom Degremont called the results a direct match for the performance goals set years earlier: 'The boat responded and behaved in the ways we expected... I couldn't be happier and I'm delighted we matched all the performance goals we had.'

MCM's Peter Wilson, who managed the project for the owners, described the helm as 'effortless and super responsive' and said the boat is 'a wolf in sheep's clothing' - a classic sheer line and low-profile deckhouse hiding a performance-oriented rig, high-aspect rudder and contemporary keel underneath. The owners' stated priority throughout was time on the water over time at a dock: Temple says the brief was explicitly not for 'a St. Tropez and St. Barths boat,' and the owners are bound for remote, high-latitude cruising rather than the Mediterranean charter circuit most new sailing superyachts are built for.

What Nobody Has Published Yet

No build cost, contract price or delivery-cost breakdown has been published for Ouzel by any party involved, and the owners themselves have not spoken publicly - every account so far comes from the design and build team, not from the people who paid for her. That leaves a genuine buyer with nothing to benchmark a comparable US custom build against, at a size where the usual reference points are Alloy Yachts or McMullen & Wing in New Zealand, or one of the German or Dutch custom-sail specialists, none of which publish firm pricing either.

Guest capacity is also modest for the length: 8 guests in 4 staterooms on a 95-foot yacht, a direct consequence of Langan's decision to spend the extra two feet of hull on cockpit and technical space rather than accommodation. A buyer comparing Ouzel to a production sailing yacht of similar LOA should expect meaningfully less interior volume in exchange for the lighter, more performance-oriented structure and the fully custom brief.

The Trade a Buyer Is Actually Making

Choosing a small yard like Rockport Marine over an established custom-sail house buys direct access to four named decision-makers, a genuinely lightweight cold-molded and carbon structure, and a boat built for the owners' stated use rather than for resale appeal - but it also means betting on a yard whose largest previous build was smaller than this one, with no dealer network, no series pricing and no second hull to compare against. Peter Wilson's own assessment doubles as the honest pitch: 'This boat is going to show the world that you really can build a world-class superyacht in the U.S. I don't think anybody thought we were going to be able to do it.'

For an owner who wants a Northern Europe-grade high-latitude cruiser without a Northern European yard's backlog or price tag, and who values a small, hands-on build team over an established brand, Ouzel is the live proof case. For a buyer who wants resale liquidity, guest capacity, or a yard with a multi-hull track record at this size, the calculus points elsewhere - at least until Rockport Marine, or another US yard, delivers a second yacht this large.