Franck Bauguil

Like your favorite magazine, he is of French provenance but has been living in the United States for so long that one would almost forget his origins. He hasn’t forgotten anything about his childhood in Brittany though, first in the north and then in the south, in La Trinité-sur-Mer to be precise. A land of yacht racing - an activity he practices assiduously - but above all, the cradle of French multihull ocean racing. He watched, fascinated, the racing machines of the Peyron brothers, or Mike Birch, flying along on one hull, four to five times faster than the monohull (however fast it might have been), that he sails on every racing weekend.

When it came to further his studies and make his professional debut, Franck put sailing on hold. With one foot on either side of the Atlantic since his business school sent him to Pennsylvania for his degree, the Moorings-Leopard-Sunsail adventure was a challenge tailor-made for this well-educated individual (MBA in International Finance). But not so fast! As is often the case, it was to be a woman who would involuntarily cause a radical turn in Franck’s professional life. When he was working as a young currency trader in Philadelphia, his girlfriend was moving to the Chesapeake Bay. “Come and join me,” she said, “There are boats in town, you’ll like it!”. Fall 1992: Franck surveyed the pontoons of his first Annapolis boat show. One handshake with Eric Bruneel later, and there he was, Fountaine Pajot agent from Canada to Chile! These were the early days of mass-produced multihulls and there was much still to be done. After two laborious first years, success. In fact, it’s not unlikely that Franck was the biggest agent in the world. But at the time, information was not circulating as it does today, and he was tempted into returning to Paris to run Moorings Europe. In two years of forced restructuring, he turned it into a profitable business. He was therefore “repatriated” in 1997 to Clearwater, the historic headquarters of the charter company. He’s been in Florida ever since. 

Two exciting decades were to follow, at the very heart of an economic adventure: the complete integration of Robertson & Caine, the merger with Sunsail and the worldwide distribution of Leopard catamarans... Franck resisted all mergers, all acquisitions and all restructuring. He is delighted to have experienced all the product developments in contact with, among others, the talented Lex Raas and Alexander Simonis.

Now ...