Fuente: www.marabierto.eu
Nautor, el astillero constructor de los Swan, fue fundado en 1966 por
el finlandés Pekka Koskenkylä en el pequeño pueblo de Jacobstad, donde
las temperaturas invernales rondan los -30º de media. En este la base
del legendario mimo puesto en la ebanistería de cada Swan.
La intención de Koskenkylä era construir el primer velero de 10 metros
capaz de regatear con éxito y además hacerlo con una acomodación
interior confortable para el crucero. También debía estar construido en
el entonces novedoso material llamado fibra de vidrio. Se podría decir
que Koskenkylä inventó el concepto del moderno crucero/regata. Y lo hizo
con una clara filosofía en mente: hacer el mejor barco posible, desde
el diseño al último detalle de acabado. Esta consideración ha seguido
vigente hasta hoy, haciendo que la marca Swan esté tan íntimamente
asociada a calidad.
Los primeros Swan
Olin Stephens fue el diseñador de “Casse Tete II”, el primer Swan 36
salido del astillero en verano de 1967 para un armador británico que en
1968 ganó las 7 mangas de la Cowes Week. La repercusión de esta
aplastante victoria fue inmediata y al Swan 36 del que se construyeron
no menos de 90 unidades- le siguió pronto un 37, luego un 43 y así hasta
los quince modelos que formaban el catálogo de la marca en los años
setenta.
Entre ellos destacar el 55 y, sobre todo el Swan 65, cuyo “Sayula” fue
el ganador de la primera Whitbread Race en los años 1973/74. En la
segunda edición de esta regata (1977/78), sendos Swan 65 ocuparon la 2ª,
4ª y 5ª plazas y durante unos diez años, el legendario Swan 65 diseñado
por S&S fue el mayor barco del mundo construido en fibra de vidrio.
Finalizando la década de los setenta, Olin Stepehns fue dejando su
actividad como diseñador por cuestiones de edad. Nautor dio entonces
paso a un joven Ron Holland para la actualización de su gama. Holland
firmó media docena de buenos barcos, pero la relación con Swan no acabó
de cuajar y en 1980 se formalizó la entrada del argentino German Frers
como responsable del diseño de todos los nuevos Swan, una relación que
sigue vigente en la actualidad.
La etapa Frers en los ochenta está considerada por muchos como la más
completa de Swan. Los modelos de esta “década dorada” aúnan la
quintaesencia del astillero finlandés, con cascos muy elegantes,
rápidos, muy bien construidos y acabados con un mimo artesanal. En 1982,
un Swan 51 fue el casco 1.000 del astillero y el Swan 46, presentado en
1983 es hasta la fecha el modelo más exitoso de la marca, con 109
unidades en el agua (la última entregada en 1997).
Tras estos años de franca expansión vinieron unos duros años noventa,
que empezaron con una caída de ventas generalizada en la primera mitad
de esta década. Las finanzas de Swan no aguantaron el envite y en 1998,
el industrial italiano Leonardo Ferragamo y un grupo de inversores se
hicieron con la propiedad del astillero para reposicionarlo como
referencia de la vela internacional.
How the Swans Were Born
by Pekka Koskenkyla
Founder of Nautor's Swan
It
all started as a hobby. I grew up on the coast (Helsinki) and I have
always had or wanted to have boats. My first vessel was a canoe, which I
built myself in the evenings after school at the age of 14. In fact
next year I built five of them for sale. Then nothing much happened in
my boat building career for ten years because of school and university,
where I majored in economics.
After
graduation I wanted to have my own boat, so I started to build a wooden
sailing boat of 11-meters. I worked in the evenings and weekends in my
father-in-law's shed in Pietarsaari, where I had a job selling paper
sacs. It took about 2 years to finish the boat and when it was almost
complete a dentist from Helsinki wanted to buy it. I gave him a, what I
thought, was a high price and he agreed. So I thought that boat building
looked like an easy way to make money doing what I liked. I decided to
start a yard.
The
first step was to find a name and get drawings. The fact that I
happened to think of SWAN was lucky, because I believe that this name
and the connotations it implies was important for the success of the
company. The other decision, which also turned out to be right and even
more crucial to our success, was to choose S&S as designers.
My
first thought had been to use the drawings of the boat that I was
building, especially as it was just the right size I was looking for. An
important factor in the overall length of the boat that I wanted to
build was that any boats over 11-meters in LOA were exempt from VAT tax.
This was of course a government concession made for the commercial
fishermen and nobody had thought of yachts, because pleasure craft in
Finland at the time were so small. A few years later this loophole was
plugged.
The first boat that I built was designed by a local
amateur naval architect and full time teacher of mathematics, Eivind
Still. He was naturally disappointed, when I decided not to use his
drawings, but Still later became quite well-known in Scandinavia with
the many boats that he later designed. At the time I was so ignorant
about this business and sailboats in general, that I did not know any
yacht designers - not even the most famous. Therefore I went to the
local yacht club in Pietarsaari and asked, who was the best designer in
the world. I was told that it was Sparkman & Stephens.
I
found their address from an old yachting magazine and wrote to the
company to tell them, that I needed drawings of a sailboat about 11-12
meters long. No reply! That really was not so surprising, because I did
not even have letterheads, let alone a company. I waited some more and
then telephoned to their office in New York. I got Rod Stephens on the
phone and he told me that by coincidence he was coming to Finland in a
couple of weeks to inspect a wooden sailboat being built at the time. He
said we could meet. Later I got a message from his client in Finland
that he could see me at 6 o'clock in his hotel room in Helsinki. However
I was not sure if that was in the morning or the evening and I could
not reach Rod to verify, so I decided not to take a risk and went to his
hotel at 6 AM. He was there waiting for me. He must have been impressed
by my enthusiasm, because that was all I had to show for.
In any
case, he gave me the drawings of a 36 feet sloop, which was to be
marketed as the SWAN 36. Later he told me that they had been waiting for
years for somebody to approach them to design a production boat in
fiberglass, but I was in fact the first one to do so. A couple of years
later a lot of builders were knocking on their door, but S&S were
very loyal to us and did not give out competing designs. The drawings I
received from Rod were of a boat already built in wood.
Later I
have sometimes thought how was it possible that I got those drawings.
Maybe Rod did not take me very seriously after all? When I came back to
Pietarsaari I needed a suitable space in a hurry. Outside the town, far
from the sea, there was an old brick building, which had been used to
process hides (skins). It was empty and I was able to rent it at a very
low rate. It needed some modifications like a much bigger door and
heating etc., but we had a place to start. I appointed my first wife's
uncle as a foreman and we started to hire people.
As I had
already built one boat in the area I knew that there were many skillful
joiners in the surrounding area of Pietarsaari. Many of them were part
time farmers and eager to take a full time job, because their farms were
so small that they could not sup-port them. In fact these people were
busy only at harvest time during the summer. Many of these people had a
small woodworking shop at home and they had been doing doors, window
frames and furniture etc. to supplement their income.
These
activities were, however, getting uneconomical, because more and more
factories were producing these items on a mass production basis and
thereby suppressing prices. The other category of workers I was able to
hire were small individual boat builders. These were typically also
small farmers or sometimes fishermen, who could not fish or farm during
the winter because of ice and snow. Their boat building operation was
family business, and most of them built wooden fishing boats, but there
were some, notably the Branbacka family, who built pleasure boats to
customers' orders.
If we go back to the history of Pietarsaari
and the surrounding counties we find that this area was once one of the
main ship building areas in Scandinavia. This was the era of wooden
sailing ships during the time when Finland was part of Sweden. These
mostly commercial vessels were built in amazing numbers and with amazing
speed. In the Pietarsaari Museum there is more information about all
this. In fact a few years ago they even built one vessel to these old
drawings on a voluntary basis.
I have gone into all the above in
more detail, because it is important to understand that the quality of
the workers and their skills in the counties around Pietarsaari is
something very special. If I had not had access to these kinds of people
we would have failed, especially considering my lack of experience in
business in general and running a yard in particular. Fortunately there
was no shortage of these highly skilled and motivated people in the
area.
We were like a family and run the business as such. One
could either say that we had perfect industrial relations or that none
of us had ever even heard about such a thing. There was one episode that
comes to mind, when I think about the loyalty of our workers at that
time. My very first delivery of the SWAN 36 was about to happen. This
was the only wooden SWAN ever built. It was built in mahogany. The
reason was that I thought we would save money this way, because a
fiberglass mold needs a wooden plug and rather than build a plug and
then destroy it, we decided take the mold off a real boat that could be
sold. All went well except that when the hull mold was being made it
cracked the planking of the wooden hull, because when the fiberglass and
resin mixture hardens, it becomes very warm, which again dries the
wooden hull underneath. These small cracks were repaired, but on a
varnished surface they could still be seen.
My customer, a
businessman from Helsinki, demanded a discount of his boat because of
this. My situation, however, was very simple. If I did not immediately
get the foil price in order to pay back a bank loan I would go broke.
The customer did not want to hear. He insisted. He even ordered a
trucking company to come and take the boat away from the yard. When he
and his men with the big truck and the crane came, my men decided to
stop the operation by physically blocking entry into the yard. As I had
more men and they seemed to be more eager for a fight, my customer
decided to pay in full.
The first year we built four boats, the
wooden one, which we used for a plug and three fiberglass SWAN 36's. I
was able to sell all of them at a very early stage. The most important
factor for this initial success was not so much my honest looking face
or the fantastic workforce we had, because we had nothing to show. It
was the name and reputation of Sparkman & Stephens. It is difficult
to understand now how superior in reputation they were compared to other
yacht designers. There was only one best choice then. The name and
reputation of S&S was built on the winning boats of their design in
all ocean racing from the America's Cup, One Ton Cup, Admirals Cup,
Cowes week etc. Most of the winners in these races were designed by
S&S.
Then came Nautor from Finland, the first to produce
S&S designed boats not only in series at a very reasonable price,
but also in a new and stronger material than wood. On the top of that,
the SWANs were lighter as well, and therefore had a better chance of
winning races. Just to broaden the appeal to more potential buyers my
sales argument was that because it was built of a lighter material we
can afford to make the boat with a nice wooden interior and therefore
appealing as a nice family cruising boat as well as a racing boat. This
was the argument the racing minded sailor needed to convince his wife.
The racing in those days was not as competitive, or rather, the boats
were not as extreme racing machines as they are today, so it was in fact
possible to win big time with a SWAN that looked like a family cruising
boat with heavy teak interior.
SWAN 36
Planos:
GENERAL DIMENSION
|
Loa:
|
35.79 ft
|
10.91 m
|
Lwl:
|
25.94 ft
|
7.77 m
|
Beam:
|
9.65 ft
|
2.94 m
|
Draft:
|
6.2 ft
|
1.9 m
|
Ballast:
|
7900 lbs
|
3600 kg
|
Displacement:
|
15400 lbs
|
7000 kg
|
Antifouled area:
|
344 ft²
|
32 m²
|
|
ON BOARD SYSTEMS
|
Fuel:
|
13.2 gal(US)
|
50 l
|
Fresh water:
|
44.9 gal(US)
|
170 l
|
Service power:
|
12 v
|
|
Engine:
|
Volvo Penta MD2
15 hp at 2300 rpm
|
|
SAIL PLAN
|
RORC
|
|
|
I:
|
43.04 ft
|
13.21 m
|
J:
|
14.04 ft
|
4.28 m
|
P:
|
38.04 ft
|
11.59 m
|
E:
|
12.04 ft
|
3.67 m
|
Fore triangle:
|
301 ft²
|
28 m²
|
Main:
|
229 ft²
|
21.3 m²
|
Genoa 150%:
|
452 ft²
|
42 m²
|
Spinnaker:
|
1088 ft²
|
101 m²
|
IOR
|
|
|
I:
|
43.2 ft
|
13.17 m
|
J:
|
13.7 ft
|
4.18 m
|
P:
|
38 ft
|
11.58 m
|
E:
|
13.05 ft
|
3.98 m
|
