Seven Outremers, Five Lagoons
The ARC+ entry list is the closest thing I've found to a revealed-preference survey of people who actually cross oceans, and it doesn't say what the brochures say.
I keep a spreadsheet of boats that have actually crossed an ocean recently. It is slower going than reading reviews and considerably more useful. The best free input to that spreadsheet is the ARC+ entry list, and one line of it has been bothering me for a week.
The 2024 ARC+ fleet — 94 boats out of Las Palmas, down to Cape Verde, then across to Grenada — carried 27 multihulls, a rally record at the time. The brand breakdown is the part I keep returning to. Fountaine Pajot had eight boats on that start line. Outremer had seven. Lagoon had five.
Sit with that for a second. Lagoon's plant is built for something north of 450 catamarans a year, and they launched their 7,000th boat in 2024. Outremer builds thirty to forty a year in La Grande Motte, with maybe three to five 52s and 55s on the shop floor at any given moment. Call it twelve to one in Lagoon's favor on units produced. On the start line of an Atlantic crossing, Outremer was ahead.
I don't read that as Outremer being twelve times the boat. The honest explanation is selection, not quality. A large share of Lagoons are sold into charter fleets in the BVI and Croatia, where the job is four cabins, a big cockpit, and a week of line-of-sight sailing. Those boats were never going to show up in Las Palmas in November, and it isn't a knock on them — they're doing the job they were bought for. Outremer sells almost entirely to owners who intend to go far, and prices accordingly. So the fleet list isn't measuring which boat is better. It's measuring which boat gets bought by people who then actually leave.
Which is exactly the number I want, because the whole project here is becoming one of those people. When I look at the 50-foot cat we're researching for the five-year trip, "which boat reviews well" is close to useless as a filter. Reviews are written after a two-hour sail in eight knots. "Which boat do people who do the thing I'm planning to do end up standing on" is a much harder question to fake, and the rally entry lists answer it for free, every November.
The uncomfortable part is what that revealed preference costs. I'm still pulling comparables, but every same-vintage, same-length pair I've priced has the Outremer well above the Lagoon — enough that the delta is a real line item in the plan, not a rounding error. And the premium buys a specific set of trade-offs, not a blanket upgrade. Daggerboards mean upwind performance and a shallower draft when they're up; they also mean two more systems to maintain and a trunk that can grind itself unhappy. Weight discipline means the boat sails beautifully at design displacement and sulks when you load it. I am planning to load it with four kids under six, a year of school materials, a watermaker, and ground tackle heavy enough that I'm looking hard at a Mantus over the Rocna purely on how it stows on a light bow.
That last conflict is unresolved for me. The boat that shows up on the ARC+ line is the boat that punishes exactly the payload a family of six brings. I don't have a clean answer yet, and I'd rather say so than pretend the spreadsheet resolved it.
Meanwhile the trend keeps going. The 2025 ARC+ fleet was 86 boats, of which 28 were catamarans and two were trimarans — about 35% multihull. The main ARC ran 32% in 2024, up from 28% the year before. If Outremer keeps out-showing a builder with twelve times the output, that stops being noise and starts being a data point I have to price in.
Numbers I'm tracking for the boat decision live in the worksheet.
