Simbad Yachts debuts ready-to-sail Simbad 55 with flexible cruising layouts

Simbad Yachts stepped into the catamaran market with a simple promise: buy the boat, step aboard, and go cruising without months of chasing upgrades. From its refit shipyard in Alicante on Spain’s southeast coast, the new builder assembled a 100-person team around the Simbad 55, a family cruising catamaran pitched as a ready-to-sail platform rather than a bare hull waiting for endless commissioning.

That pitch lands in a corner of the market where owners often spend as much time and money on systems, electronics and comfort gear as they do on the boat itself. Simbad’s answer is a stepped package structure that makes the cost of ownership easier to read from the start. The company’s comparison page lists four versions: Base at €1.3 million, Select at €1.895 million, Ultra at €2.38 million and Legend at €2.99 million. The spread from entry build to top trim is more than €1.6 million, which neatly frames the point Simbad is making about hidden outfitting costs.

The boat itself is presented as a roomy but efficient offshore cat. Simbad describes the Simbad 55 as 17.59 metres long with an 8.92-metre beam, while Darnet Design lists the yacht at 16.95 metres and credits Pierre Delion as the naval architect. French designer Franck Darnet handled the styling, and the layout can be configured with the galley up or down, plus two to five cabins, including crew quarters. That flexibility gives the model a broader range than a pure private owner’s cruiser, stretching toward semi-charter use or crews who want proper support spaces built in.

Even the base version is outfitted as a serious cruising boat, with sailing and propulsion gear, solar panels and the practical systems needed to leave the dock without a long shopping list. Move up the range and the Simbad 55 becomes much more aggressively specified. The Legend package includes twin Yanmar 150hp engines, 1,200-litre fuel tanks, 3,150W of solar panels, a 12kVA or 18kVA generator depending on trim, Sea.AI collision-avoidance and night-vision tech, joystick control, a bow thruster, electric winches and furlers, and a watermaker.

Multihulls World described the Simbad 55 as a bluewater catamaran with a protected forward cockpit, reinforcing the offshore brief. Simbad has also started marketing boats through dealers in Cannes, France, and says it offers purchasing assistance, signs that the yard is not just unveiling a concept but pushing an early sales effort behind a very specific idea: a cruising catamaran that feels finished before the owner ever takes delivery.