A high school dropout at the age of 15, Lex Raas says his father’s boatyard was his university, a proving ground where a lifelong fascination with building better boats began. A young South African with a love of being on the water and a chip on his shoulder, Raas’s earliest sailing cats were relatively simple craft. Yet those first experiences were formidable and would lead him to go on to form the catamaran giants Leopard and Aquila. He’s too humble to say it himself so I’ll do it for him: No single person has advanced this category of power boat like Raas. The father of the modern power cat? I’m not sure anyone in the industry would argue with the title.
Fit, spry, with a razor-sharp wit and an easy laugh, some say Raas is starting to wind down his prolific career now that two of his sons Jean and Alain are at the helm of Aquila, his most successful professional venture. While I remain skeptical about his ability to “slow down,” I guess there’s a first time for anything, and it seems that his next act with Aquila might just be his most impactful; helping to charter a course for the brand to reach a younger demographic all around the world.
PMY: Your resume is legendary, but how did you get started in the boat business?
Raas: My dad, he was a boater all of his life and actually I did my first sailboat race at the age of 4 in South Africa where I was born. I was born into boating. I played all sorts of sports, but always loved the water. There’s just nothing better than being on the water.
My dad, he owned two magazines in South Africa; one was for powerboaters and one was for sailors. He competitively raced sailboats and also competitively raced powerboats. I was exposed to both power and sail at a young age. I’ve always enjoyed both, although my latter years were mostly spent on power boats.
My dad also had a small boatyard in South Africa, and he was running sailing classes and was thinking about getting into boat building. I was 15 at the time, I loved sport but wasn’t the best scholar, and actually, I really dropped out of school at that point and started building boats. We started small; I built some wooden boats first, but then we also started a little fiberglass sailboat that he designed and those were the days, the early seventies, where nobody knew much about fiberglass at all, so we made all the mistakes you could possibly make, which was actually good for me. I was hands-on building boats, plugs, molds, I mean, there’s nothing I ain’t done on boats. That was my university, that’s where I learned.
[Raas would go on to scale the production of those boats to a point where they were producing one 22-foot sailboat each week.]
We were cooking. Then, as I liked to joke with friends, when I got some money—and it wasn’t a lot of money—I moved to Cape Town and left my dad and started building boats with some guys that all sort of raced boats really. I met my wife, Carol, and then we ended up with our own boatyard, which actually ended up being pretty big. We had about 80 employees and we were building fiberglass boats. We were doing some special one-offs for the Navy, which in those days were super composites, and playing with carbon—that was the early eighties. And then we started building a little power boat, which was that little high-sea cat. That was my first production power cat, I guess.
PMY: Can you tell me a little more about that first cat?
Raas: Yeah, so there was a guy by the name of Dr. Hopper at the Stellenbosch University. He developed assisted foiling, and I really loved the idea and got involved, and we built the tooling for the Stellenbosch University. We ended up building quite a few of them. They were tiny little boats and only had twin 30s, but we had these foils on them and they really worked very, very well. But there was still a lot to learn.
PMY: How did you go from being your own builder to working for Beneteau?
Raas: Eventually the boat building slowed down and we started importing Beneteau sailboats at that point, but then sanctions (against the South African government) came along and the exchange rate divided by three overnight.
I called up Beneteau and asked if they had a job for me in France. They said, “Yes, as soon as you get here you can start.” I didn’t even have anything in writing, but we literally sold the farm and the business, packed our four kids and flew to Europe to start working there. That’s when I got exposed to more power boats and sailboats and fishing boats and everything. So that was a huge opportunity to work for Beneteau at that point. And then I moved to the U.S. where the company set up a factory in Marion, South Carolina. That was in 1986. So, a lot happened in the early eighties. A lot.
[Raas would go on to return to France to lead product development while, splitting his family between the U.S. and Europe. The role, while formative, was not meant to last. Prioritizing family over his career, he returned to the U.S. and joined The Moorings as a mid-level director in Clearwater.]
That’s when I got the opportunity to really start digging into catamarans again. The Moorings had a bunch of Lagoons but the management team said, “People are not enjoying these catamarans.” And I was like, no, I don’t believe that. I said, “I want to do a survey on everybody that’s taken out a Lagoon. I want to understand if that’s true.” And fundamentally, customers loved the idea of the catamaran because of the stability. Their friends were happy, but the galley was down below, the sail controls are at the back end and the engines were tiny so they couldn’t motor upwind. So, I took all that in and said to the exec team, “I think we should not be getting out of sailing cats.” They decided to get out of sailing cats anyway.
I said, “That’s absolutely the wrong thing to do.” So, they sort of allowed me to go ahead and work on this. I came up with some ideas on my boat, talked to a lot of builders actually to try to get it going. And I got rejected by every builder. All of them. So, I called up my buddy in South Africa, John Robertson, and said, “Hey John, you want to build some cats?” I said, “What if I organize 80 orders and we develop a boat ourselves and we get going? And he said, “Okay, I’m not sure how we’re going to do that, but let’s figure it out.”
So, we met and there were a couple of ups and downs, and The Moorings was second guessing the cats again and eventually I put it all on the line and said, “Look, either we go with this cat or I’m going to go somewhere else and do it.” I had no clue where I was going to go, but I was so convinced this was the right thing to do. They ordered 17 boats from Robertson and Caine and Leopard was born. Leopard is a huge brand now that came from absolutely nothing, nothing, nothing. I guess the next question is how did the power cats happen?
Though pioneering, early models from Aquila and Leopard (above) were not what you would call things of beauty.
PMY: You’re doing both sides of the interview now, Lex, don’t steal my job. But yes, when did you chop off those hideous masts?
Raas: It’s a fun story. Our CEO at The Moorings said, “We’re going to get into power cat charters.” We thought power and sail owners, they don’t mix at all. This was our wisdom at the time. So, we started Nordic Blue, which was started in St. Thomas because we said we have to keep our boat brands totally separate. We had like 15 boats I think, but the boats didn’t hold up. Chartering’s tough, it’s tough on boats, but the fun thing was that somebody would come down for a power-cat charter and we would say, “Sorry the power boat’s down, but we’ve got some sailing cats here in the BVI, just ignore the mast and run it like a power boat. And the customers liked that. And then they’d go out for the week. They’d come back and they’d say, “That was the best vacation I’ve ever, ever had.” And so we were like, oh, okay, so we actually abandoned the Nordic Blue brand because we realized that in the BVI it’s not about power or sail, the number one thing is being on a boat and having fun with your family and friends and … rum.
So, we developed within Leopard these sailing cats with slightly bigger engines, but the accommodations were the same. That was the start of power cats in The Moorings. It was a hallelujah moment to say, you know what, this market is so much bigger.
PMY: How and why did you make the jump from Leopard to founding Aquila?
Raas: I departed The Moorings in 2010 and was under a non-compete until 2011. I was always impressed with [MarineMax Founder] Bill McGill. He was so gung-ho, I called him and said, “Hey Bill, I’m looking for something to do.”
We met and we said, how about power cats? Let’s do something with power cats. And I said, let’s go. So, we had no clue what we were going to do, but I had to wait for my non-compete to end. Bill and myself started by contacting all the big boat building brands in the U.S. and they all said, “No, we’re not interested in building power cats.” It was the same story as sailing cats in the eighties. So, Sino Eagle, the Chinese guys—we’d actually done a deal with them through Leopard just before the crisis—were building boats for Leopard in a very small factory and I was very impressed with them. And I said to Bill, “Why don’t we go and meet these guys?” So, we flew over in 2012. We met with them and there was just a piece of dirt there. We said, let’s make this happen. And it was literally just a huge piece of dirt.
So that’s really how the idea came about; it was good people getting together and then the ideas flowed. We started on a couple of boats for the charter business and then started focusing more on the private owners. The Aquila brand is owned by the folks in China. MarineMax had, until recently, the exclusive global distribution. That’s now shifting slightly. I like to say that Aquila is no longer a teenager, it needs to grow up and stand on its own but with a super strong relationship with MarineMax who is our distributor in the Americas.
The first boat we built was actually an Aquila 37; we just built a few just to get going quickly. We then started on the keel of a 48, so that was really the first focus. And we partnered with J&J Design out of Slovenia; when we started we were predominantly focused on charter, which is where the market was at the time. But it was a good way to get boats out and to get people trying power cats.
We built close to 40 of the 48s, so it was okay, but not where we wanted it to be. Then we followed that with the 44, which is probably the number one inboard catamaran in terms of units ever built in the world. I think we’re over 200 units now. So yeah, that’s been an amazing, amazing success. And that was where we introduced the huge master cabin ready for the private owner. That was just a knockout straight away. We’ve continued to evolve Aquila ever since. Our new sport boats coming up are very, very focused on the younger folks and getting them into boating at a better price point. We’re trying to bring people into power cats as quickly as we can.
The Aquila brand seems to be evolving at warp speed, taking on both the cruiser market and outboard-powered dayboat segment.
PMY: There’s a rumor that you’re choosing to slow down. You don’t seem to me like somebody that knows how to slow down, but I know your sons are now taking on leadership positions within the company. How does that feel?
Raas: Yeah, I’m super, super proud of where we are. And yes, I’m taking more of the backseat role now and that is family- and health-related a little bit. But also, I’ve always had a feeling that in our industry, it’s a lot of older folks. They’re really good, they really know their stuff, but they’re not making way for the younger generation. I’ve always said to myself, we’ve got to make sure that Aquila is being driven always with younger folks.
I’ve been very blessed, but I also recognize the importance of handing over the reins because there’s been some iconic brands that have sort of not stayed with it—because the younger generation thinks differently.
Listen to Dan’s full interview with Lex Raas on the Power & Motoryacht podcast here ▶
