AccueilActu VoileBateauxBertrand Cardis and Decision, a history of boats dating back over quarter...

Bertrand Cardis and Decision, a history of boats dating back over quarter of a century

With the creation of Bernard Stamm’s latest 60 footer, Décision Ltd has entered the last bastion of ocean racing still missing from its references, IMOCA. Indeed being located in the region of Lausanne since 2008, the Swiss business has been involved in every aspect of competitive sailing, from the Whitbread to the America’s Cup, speed records and the Audi MedCup. Bertrand Cardis, who has managed the company since day one, touches on this success with a modest distance and largely attributes it to the passion which drives the team: “We simply like boats and we enjoy building fine, high performance craft.”

An hydraulics engineer from the Swiss Federal Technology Institute (EPFL), Cardis is in fact a sailing enthusiast with a rather enviable career. “I come from a line of doctors so in theory that should have been my destiny. Instead, despite my father’s advice, I opted to put my efforts into a domain I was especially fond of, boats.” For a long while Cardis was one of the top Swiss dinghy sailors, before taking up the role of watch leader in the Whitbread 81-82 on Disque d’Or III. Still eager for competition on his return, he began an Olympic campaign with Rainer Frölich and qualified for the Los Angeles Games aboard a Flying Dutchman. During this time, Pierre Fehlmann, the only Swiss ocean racing skipper at that time, got together the funds to build a maxi for the 1984-85 round the world race. Anxious to hold onto the project’s reins, Fehlmann decided to create a yard in which to build his Farr design in Switzerland. He offered Cardis the chance to manage the project and Décision was born on the outskirts of Geneva. To get its hand in the yard built the Passion II, which took victory in the One Ton Cup that same year, along with the DF Design, an innovative Libera destined for Lake Geneva and Lake Garda.

The following year, UBS Switzerland won the race in elapsed time and the victory finally enabled the Swiss sailing set to walk the length of the pontoons with their heads held high. Décision naturally turned the situation to best account and emerged as a reference yard for the implementation of composite materials. However it wasn’t easy to see how the company could move forward from that and after the victory of the Swiss maxi in Portsmouth there were questions about the viability of such a yard on Helvetian soil, with what was reputed to be an expensive workforce. Bertrand Cardis even got a job in industry: “the only year of my life when I worked for a boss”, he states, happy with his how his career has panned out.

The advent of 40 feet multihulls on Lake Geneva brought about a new market which Décision didn’t fail to be a part of. Furthermore, Fehlmann continued with his Whitbread projects, and in ‘88 introduced two new maxi-ketches to the yard, Merit Cup and La Poste. The production of the Grand-Mistral, a maxi-monohull class which went on to suffer an unfortunate fate, was also coordinated by Cardis’ team. The ASL, the Happycalopse and Bertarelli’s multihulls, including the famous Le Black, were to come out of the workshops in Morges. We mustn’t forget the Décision 35 either, which is still a reference in terms of top level one design boats. The arrival of Bertarelli in the America’s Cup marked a new era, and the company took up quarters in Corsier sur Vevey, just beside the Serono factory. Fehlmann stood down at that point and left the way for two former employees to take up his portfolio with Bertrand Cardis, namely Jean-Marie Fragnière and Claude-Alain Jacot. Four America’s Cup class boats as well as the floats on Alinghi 5 were to mark these crazy years for Swiss sailing.

Since that time, Décision has finally moved into some specially built premises close to the EPFL. The research centre has been a long-standing partner in the development of a whole host of its projects. Forty-five employees, predominantly involved in production, now work at the yard full-time. Furthermore a research department has been created to take on certain development tasks. Hydroptère.ch and Piccard’s solar aeroplane have already been created in these new workshops, whilst the beams of the Multi One Design are being produced alongside Stamm’s Kouyoumdjian design.

Bertrand Cardis doesn’t intend to stop there either and already has his sights on the aviation market. “We have devised some so-called ‘out of autoclave’ production techniques, which are very interesting financially. We can produce parts with virtually identical mechanical properties to the material which comes from an autoclave, without the constraints of the latter.” For the engineer from the canton of Vaud, these processes represent real potential for the future. “The price to pay for these developments is that my work has been transformed and I’m a business manager. I hardly touch the technical aspects of the job anymore.” However, he views this situation philosophically and considers it to be a normal evolution in the context of the developments he comes across in the business of building boats.

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