Bandholm sailboats: one designer's signature across three separate builders
"Bandholm" is not a boatyard's name so much as a designer's - Knud Olsen's - carried across three distinct production arrangements between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. Olsen ran his own small yard in Bandholm harbour for little more than a decade; the hulls of his early designs were actually cast elsewhere, at Erria-boat in Ærøskøbing, because Bandholm itself had no casting facilities; and production later passed to Mariboat, first in Maribo and then, after the company was reconstructed, in Sakskøbing. Olsen himself was a far bigger name in Danish sailing than the Bandholm boats alone suggest, having designed the world-famous OK dinghy and served, without credit, as chief designer of the Nordic Folkboat.
Origins and ownership
Knud Olsen was born in 1919 in Præstø, one of triplet brothers - with Torben and Bjørn - whose father worked as a carpenter. In the early 1950s he went to work for A.P. Botved, which had begun building speedboats in Vordingborg from veneers covered in fibreglass, American-style; there he worked alongside the yard's American in-house designer, James "Jim" Wynne, who later developed the outboard drive used on most modern motorboats. Olsen stayed with Botved until the end of 1961, when he left and set up his own business, which he called Bandholm Boats, in an abandoned grain warehouse in Bandholm harbour. He began there by building a 10-meter squaresterner in mahogany before turning his attention to the possibilities of fibreglass. In 1972 Olsen stopped operating the yard; production of the Bandholm boats moved to the newly formed Mariboat, and the Bandholm premises themselves were sold to Carl Engblom. When Mariboat later ran into financial trouble, Olsen was forced back into boatbuilding himself, mostly simple jobs and refitting bigger boats rather than running a design-and-build business of his own.
The designers
Olsen's fame reaches well past the boats that carried his hometown's name. In 1941, at just 22, he entered a design called "Swan" in the competition for the new Folkboat, and later served as the class's uncredited chief designer. A spare-time dinghy design of his went unbuilt for years until architect Axel Damgaard revived it in 1956, becoming the world-famous OK dinghy - recognized by the IYRU as an international world-championship class already in 1961, the first Danish design to hold that status, and a distinction Olsen held alone until Niels Jeppesen's X-99 achieved the same rank. Around 18,000 OK dinghies have been built worldwide; Olsen gave the design rights away, first to the Danish Sailing Union and later to the IYRU. He also designed the first Jupiter, a 30-foot motorboat built in 1961 at Toft Olesens Bådværft on Bogø for yacht broker Klaus Baess. Over his career Olsen built about 175 boats. His son, Lars Olsen, inherited his father's talent and later designed the L23 among other boats - a separate designer working a generation on, not a continuation of the Bandholm line, though the two did work together once: in 1974 Olsen designed and built a quarter-tonner named Nell for that year's Quarter Ton Cup in Limhamn, Sweden, with his then-17-year-old son among the crew who helped build it. Nearly 70, and before he "went ashore" as a sailor, Olsen's last boat was a Møn 28 motorsailer for which he built an entirely new coachroof, deck, and interior himself, in the same teak-and-mahogany style as his Bandholm boats. He died in his hometown of Bandholm on August 31, 2010, at 90; Gorm Boa, owner of one of Olsen's last big wooden boats, a 1965 Bandholm 40 named Nirvana, remembered him to Minbaad.dk as a decent, kind man and skilled boatbuilder who was never much of a businessman.
Construction through the eras
The early lineup - the Bandholm 20, 24, 26, and 30 - had their hulls cast at Erria-boat in Ærøskøbing and were fitted out by Olsen at Bandholm Boats. On these boats, only the hull was fibreglass; Olsen always felt the deck should be wood to give a boat the right feel, so the 1963 Bandholm 26 carries a wood deck and coachroof over its glass hull. The Bandholm 24 followed as the first design with a fibreglass deck as well as hull, and, per Bådmagasinet, was the first design that let Olsen make a living as a licensed designer in his own right. Production later moved to Mariboat - first in Maribo, then, after the company's reconstruction, in Sakskøbing - which built the Bandholm 27, 28, 33, and 35. The 1977 Bandholm 27 was the first true all-glass Bandholm, with a shorter, more modern keel and both hull and deck in fibreglass; roughly 300 were built, and the model is regarded by many Nordic sailors as a classic. The OK Dinghy International Association's designer profile groups the Bandholm 26 with the Bianca 27 and Great Dane 28 as the first generation of Danish fibreglass keelboats; Bådmagasinet's account instead distinguishes it from "true" fibreglass contemporaries like the Danboat 32 and Sagitta 30, precisely because only its hull, not its deck, was glass.
Lines and generations
The Bandholm 35, designed in the late 1970s, was a rare case of Olsen working with a co-designer, Mogens Lorentzen. It carried some of Olsen's signature practical touches: a teak grate below the companionway steps let wet sailing gear drip dry without flooding the cabin sole, a detail later copied by other designers and yards, and a stern that could open into a rescue or swim ladder, an early version of a transom style that has since become common on modern cruisers.
Who Bandholm is for
A buyer drawn to the Bandholm name is really buying into Knud Olsen's design hand across three different builders, not one company's factory output. Sailors who want Olsen's own wood-and-glass construction, from the era when he ran the yard himself, should look to the early 20, 24, 26, and 30; those after the fully glassed, more modern-keeled boats that carried his name into its best-known form should look to the Mariboat-built 27 and its siblings.
