Atlantis 360

A real offshore cruising boat in really good shape, sandblasted and antifouled dec 2012, ready to go round the world.

Gilbert Caroff (now semi-retired) has about 5000 boats of his design in the water, motor boats, canal boats and sailboats. He has made a speciality in exploratory and polar sailboats. He is well know for being the architect with the highest number of "civil" sailboat that have gone to the north pole, the antartic, and that have spend years in the ice and some even did the travel around the world through the north pole passages...

He is mostly unknown in North America because his website is only in french. This is sad because there are some technical papers on his site, one is very interesting where he explain why a "deriveur" - there is no english word for this centerboard is close but do not reflect the true nature of it - thus why a deriveur is safer in a following sea in a storm than any keel boat that can broach and trip over the keel if a large wave catch the boat. On a deriveur, when the winds blow hard and you have to run before the gale, the helmsman lift the keel (which has no ballast inside) and then the boat freed from that added resistance plane on waves and if a wave want to push the boat on one side, the boat just slip like a soap in the water. Impossible to trip or to broach. Very safe. No life lost in any of his boats that have been in harsh place like Spitsbergen and Antartic.
His most popular designs are flat bottom, deck saloon, deriveur (center board) sailboats that can land on the bottom and have less than 3 feet of draft.

Caroff is the only architect know with so much of its boat having gone on the poles and Dujardin, the builder has built most of Caroff aluminum design.