Surprise 25
sailboat class

The Surprise 25, is a one-design racer first built in 1977, designed by Michel Joubert of Joubert Nivelt Design.
The Surprise 25 was followed in production by the larger 31.30 ft (9.54 m) Grand Surprise in 1999.
Production
The design was built by Archambault Boats of Dangé-Saint-Romain and also by the BG Race shipyard in Saint-Malo in France between 1977 and 2017, with 1,550 boats completed, but it is now out of production. Archambault, which had been founded in 1967, went out of business in 2015. The BG Race shipyard, founded in 2013, built many designs for Archambault and went out of business in 2017.
Design
The Surprise 25 is a recreational keelboat, built predominantly of fibreglass. The hull is solid fibreglass and the deck is balsa-cored fibreglass. It has a 7/8 fractional sloop rig with aluminum spars, a deck-stepped mast, wire standing rigging and a single set of swept spreaders. The hull has a raked stem, a slightly reverse transom with an inset, an internally mounted spade-type rudder controlled by a tiller with a "D"-handle extension. It was delivered with a choice of a fixed fin keel, twin asymmetrical keels with bulb weights, or a swing keel.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q728244. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1999, 2017 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Surprise 25” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.