Beauty and beast
Sleek, powerful, radically new… With her teak decks and seductive interior, you just wonder what she is all about – until sails are set and she whisks away, in the lightest of puffs. At sea with Nautor’s ClubSwan 50
July in Finland is off-season. Companies closed, families gone to their summer houses. So it is a somewhat eerie sight to come to Nautor, this hallmark of a boatbuilder, with a brand new yacht moored in front of the Pietarsaari plant, workers everywhere when in fact there should be no one and nothing around.
Normally the Finnish adhere to national holidays like they were a religious thing. They care to spend time with their relatives and friends. Normally at Nautor they assemble boats inside, not on the dock. And normally, if and when they do invite you to a sea trial they will have checked and fixed every little detail to a degree rarely seen.
This year, however, is anything but. It marks their 50th anniversary – a date few serial production yards have passed. Nautor did not just weather this past half-century. They moulded it, earning a near-mythical reputation early on when pioneering GRP boatbuilding. Unforgotten Ramon Carlin’s win in the first Whitbread Round the World Race 1973/74 on his Swan 65 Sayula. Now at 50 and matured in many ways, Nautor are not going to sit
44 SEAHORSE
still. Quite the contrary. With the ClubSwan 50 they present a yacht pivotal to their near future. ‘It’s not just a new model,’ says marketing director Vanni Galgani. ‘It’s a statement.’
The smallest boat of the range, she is also the technologically most advanced, built and cured in pre-preg carbon epoxy. At 8.5 tons – 3.45 of which are attributed to her keel ballast – no other serial production yacht her length comes lighter, none carries more sail area. On the yard’s commissioning dock the sound of small, choppy waves nudging her stern is indicative of both her strength and nimbleness – it resembles that of a Laser or a 505, so thin the layers of carbon cloth, so light the panel just above the water.
She is carbon everywhere: rudder stock and blades with tubercled trailing edges like on Rambler 88 are, of course, carbon. The 3m keel fin: pure high-modulus carbon. Even the hinged backrests of her salon sofas, doubling as sea-berths, are made of carbon – as are the teak veneered floorboards, the dining table, the masterfully infused mast support, the base of the berths.
Swan no1 Tarantella (inset) keeps the new
ClubSwan 50 honest as the latest product from Nautor goes sailing for the first time. The
original Swan 36 is now a design icon but it also remains a formidable performer on handicap on windy wind- ward-leeward courses.
A keel gallery allows a
displacement range of
250kg for the ClubSwan 50, to help it also slot into both of today’s principal offshore rating
systems
Just the frames of the hatches break with this regime. As a visual quote of Nautor’s past they are artfully built from solid teak. Why this? Well, because the ClubSwan 50 is still supposed to be a Swan. She may be a one-design racer-cruiser, she may be competitive in ORC or IRC according to her set-up. But never ever would Nautor’s main shareholder Leonardo Ferragamo conceive a pure racer. Hence her vast decks covered in teak (3mm thin, though, mind you!). Hence her so artfully designed and decorated cabin. In fact, if seasoned sailors went down below blindfolded and had to tell just what kind of boat this is few would ever imagine her to be a thoroughbred.
In Pietarsaari, side by side with the 50, lies her role model, her ancestor: Tarantella. Build number 1, model 1. The first and only one in 1966 when the legacy began. This legendary Sparkman & Stephens-designed Swan 36 started it all. A slender, narrow hull with timeless lines, a cockpit so tiny you wonder how she could ever accommodate more than a couple. Her benign stature makes her a
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