Superyachts
The Baltic 67 Aledoawas the first cruiser-racer ever built in pre-preg carbon fibre, launched in 1996
manager Ingmar Sundelin, designer Tor Hinders and Johansson – became the nucleus of Baltic Yachts. ‘They had a strong belief in
themselves, courage to swimupstream and test new ideas,’ Baltic Yachts’ marketingmanager Elisabet Holm explains. ‘They all had a passion for boats, a strong driving force to learn new things and research technology, and they were always ready tomeet new challenges.’ The original Baltic 46was far ahead
of its time. At a timewhen nearly all newdesigns simply relied on the naval architect’s eye, experience and intuition, several different hullmodels were tank tested across a range of speeds, at various heel and leeway angles before the design of the 46 was finalised and only thenwas it built. It had a balanced spade rudder and solid rod rigging,whichwere then used only on hi-tech racing yachts and its teak deckwas laidwith epoxy resin. But the hull laminate itselfwas the key innovation. ‘In those daysmost yards building
larger yachts used woven rovings with fibres bent, not straight, hence not structurally optimal and they also
80 SEAHORSE
”Itwas eagerness to embrace newtechnology that prompted the founding of Baltic Yachts”
resulted in resin concentration,’ Johasson explains. ‘You could see the roving patterns on the surface, due to resin shrinking, so before applying the rovings they used several layers of choppedmat, which has very low structural value, especially on larger yachts, but added a lot of weight.’ ‘‘We used a very
thin surface cloth and the rest of the laminate was
unidirectional fibres, oriented in the direction of the stresses and perfectly straight, hence stronger and stiffer. The fibres we used did not create resin concentration so there was less print-through on the hull surface. Unidirectional does not build up thickness like woven rovings so we used themwith a corematerial in sandwich construction. This achieved much higher panel stiffness than a single laminate and gave usmore flexibility for panel sizes.’ End grain balsa was the core for
the 46 but Baltic soon switched to foamcores with a variety of densities and strengths. Carbon fibre was used from1979, initially in rudder posts, beamtops and to reinforce high- stress areas of the hull where extra
stiffness was needed. As stabilised foams for high-temperature cures and then Nomex for pre-preg carbon construction became available, Baltic pioneered the use of thosematerials. Baltic Yachts’ early achievements
belie the fact that it faced strong headwinds right fromthe start. 1973 was a bad year to launch a new brand of sailing yachts, with the global oil crisis looming. The yachting industry as a whole was hit hard and by 1977 Baltic had to seek outside investment to stay in business. Ironically that same year saw their firstmajor commercial success, selling 12 Baltic 39s at the Hamburg Boat Show, which was unheard of at the time. Hollming, a Finnish shipbuilder,
acquired Baltic. Two of the founders, Nils Luoma and Ingmar Sundelin, quit but the takeover turned out to be a positivemove. Hollming provided stability and investment to help Baltic grow. A huge production hall was built, funds were provided for new model development andmarketing. An unusual aspect of Baltic Yachts
that undoubtedly worked in its favour was the dual role of Johansson. It’s rare that the technical guru of a major boatbuilder is also its head of sales andmarketing, yet he combined
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