Grain de Sail II

Grain de Sail’s first cargo sailboat, a 24 meter aluminum hull demonstrator, was built in France, near Nantes, and has been in operation since November 2020. For Grain de Sail II, a larger ship of 52 meters also made of an aluminum hull, multiple French and European shipyards were invited to respond to our request for quotation. While some shipyards decided not to participate, some did and the shipyard from Brittany, France, PIRIOU, was selected in January 2022. Their proposal, consisting in performing part of the work at their headquarters in France and the other at their specialized site for aluminum construction based in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, was the most adequate for our needs. The company, LORIMA, based in Lorient, France was selected for the build and fitting of the masts while the naval architect firm, L2Onaval based in Brittany, worked on the design of our cargo sailboat.

The selection of a shipyard is a very significant decision that is made above all according to a strict list of requirements, overall competence and quality, ability to deliver the ship on schedule, and of course budgetary constraints as well as shared values between our companies. In the end, Piriou was retained with its perfectly-aligned proposal and the solution to build in Vietnam.

A project of this size for the build of an entirely new ship is complex and takes years to organize and turn into reality. Great efforts and thousands of hours of work by our teams and external partners from different fields were necessary to solve all the technical and financial challenges.

• Competence and quality

• Availability and defined schedule

• Budget

• Shared values

It is important to keep in mind that building wind-propelled merchant vessels is something new and that French shipyards may not be capable or the most adapted to take on such projects. While our preference has always been to work with local providers, the list of criteria mentioned above must be taken into account in the decision and selection process (not only national preference). Let’s also mention that currently no other French wind-propulsion program is being built in France (Poland, Turkey, Romania, etc.). We depend on an emerging ecosystem that surpasses Grain de Sail and that is expected to become more robust as the wind propulsion industry matures.