The Archambault Grand surprise training ship

Information about the ship and the shipyard

The Grand Surprise is a French sailing boat designed by Joubert Nivelt Design as a racing boat and first built in 1999.

The Grand Surprise followed the smaller 7.65 m Surprise, which went into production in 1977.

The design was built by Archambault Boats in Dangé-Saint-Romain and by the BG Race shipyard in Saint-Malo in France between 1999 and 2017, with 110 boats completed, but it is no longer in production today. The Archambault shipyard, founded in 1967, ceased operations in 2015. The BG Race shipyard, founded in 2013, built numerous designs for Archambault and ceased operations in 2017.

The Grand Surprise is a racing keelboat built predominantly from fiberglass. The hull is made of single-ply polyester fiberglass, while the deck is a fiberglass-polyester sandwich. The boat has a 7/8 sloop rig with aluminum spars, a keel stepped mast, standing rigging of wire and two sets of swept spreaders. The hull has a vertical stem, an open, inverted stern, an inboard spade rudder steered by a tiller and a fixed, swept fin keel. It displaces 2,650 kg and carries 1,050 kg of ballast. With the standard keel, the boat has a draft of 2.05 meters.

The boat is equipped with an 8 kW Lombardini diesel engine for mooring and maneuvering. The fuel tank holds 26 liters.

For sailing downwind, the construction can be equipped with a symmetrical spinnaker of 138.0 m2 or an asymmetrical spinnaker of 77.0 m2. It has a hull speed of 7.25 knots.

Our Grand Surprise is specially equipped for school use. She has extensive modern sails, a fully battened mainsail with a “lazy jack”, a sequential furling system for the headsails (jib or genoa) and spinnaker equipment. Modern instrumentation is available to students for training.