Bianca sailboats: a Danish family yard that built one cruiser at home and lent its name to an internationally raced daysailer
Bianca is a small boatbuilding family from the Danish island of Langeland, and its story runs on two separate tracks. At home in Rudkøbing, three generations of the Leth Christensen family built, lost, and eventually reclaimed a yard whose signature product was the long-keeled Bianca 27 cruiser. Away from home, the same yard took over production of a Swedish-born one-design racer, the Aphrodite 101, and passed it along to two further builders after its own production ended.
Origins and ownership
Holger Leth Christensen trained as a boatbuilder at Aarhus Yachtværft and with the noted Molich yard in Hundested before setting up his own operation at Stige Ø, in the Odense Fjord, in the late 1950s. There, in 1959, he began building a wooden 28-foot sailboat called the Peti, designed by his older brother, naval architect Svend Aage Christensen. A visit to boatbuilder brothers at Danboat, on the neighboring island of Ærø, who were building the American 32-foot Chesapeake in fiberglass under license, convinced Holger that fiberglass was the material of the future.
Needing more space, Holger learned that the decommissioned depot of the Langelandsbanen railway, at the harbor in Rudkøbing, was for sale; he bought it around 1963 and set up a yacht yard there, still called Stige Ø Bådebyggeri i Rudkøbing at first. The tower-topped depot had itself been built around 1910 for the railway, which was decommissioned that same year when the Langeland bridge opened; traces of its three tall gates, built for the passage of steam locomotives, are still visible inside the current Bianca Yachts hall. Under production manager Per Munch, who had apprenticed with Holger at Stige Ø before being sent to Langeland to help build up the new operation, Holger began experimenting with a 27-foot fiberglass "havkrydser," or ocean cruiser. By 1964, Svend Aage had a further-developed version of the Peti design ready on the drawing board, engineered specifically to be built in the new polyester-reinforced fiberglass. The result, the Bianca 27, gave the yard its name that year when it moved to Rudkøbing. More than 500 were built there over the following decade; the last carried hull number 604. Alongside the 27, the yard also delivered the Commander 31, the Bianca 26/28, and the Sagitta 35.
In December 1972, Holger bought the Sagitta yard in Svendborg from Poul Cadovius, briefly making him Denmark's largest boatbuilder with around 225 employees. Bianca had no interest in the Svendborg yard's Sagitta 20 and 26 models, but continued building the Sparkman & Stephens–designed Sagitta 35, later reworking it into the Bianca 36, known as "Little Swan." The oil crisis then hit the industry hard, and in 1975, the same year new Bianca 27 deliveries ended, Holger had to give up Bianca Yacht to the Jutland car company Tranberg. He went on to found the Blue Dane/Blue Leth yard on Ellehaven in Rudkøbing and later Leths Yacht Værft by the town's ferry berths. The Bianca boatyard itself closed under its later owners in 1994, at which point Holger's son bought back the Bianca name and rights, returning the brand to the family; after a subsequent land swap with the municipality, the family was able to move Bianca Yacht back into the original halls. The Bianca name continues under Anders Leth Christensen, who runs it in Rudkøbing as a repair yard and yacht brokerage rather than a production builder.
The designers
Svend Aage Christensen, Holger's older brother and a trained naval architect, drew several of the yard's early wooden boats and shaped its first major success, the Peti, before reworking the design into the fiberglass Bianca 27. The Commander 31 carried a design credit of its own: naval architect Knud E. Hansen, working alongside Jan Kjærulff, in the late 1960s. Kjærulff later paired with Paul Elvstrøm on the Aphrodite 101, commissioned by sailing enthusiast Jørgen Juul Rasmussen: Kjærulff drew the hull, while Elvstrøm tuned the deck layout and drew the tall, sleek rig, aiming for speed, sailing experience, and comfort.
Construction through the eras
Bianca's own construction story runs from mahogany to fiberglass. The Peti was built in mahogany at Stige Ø beginning in 1959; after Holger's visit to the licensed-Chesapeake builders on Ærø convinced him fiberglass was the future, Svend Aage's 1964 redesign of the Peti was engineered around the new polyester-reinforced fiberglass, and Per Munch's crew built the first fiberglass "havkrydser" in the old railway depot, the boat that became the Bianca 27.
Lines and generations
Bianca's home-built line ran the 27 alongside the Commander 31, Bianca 26/28, Sagitta 35, and Bianca 36; the yard's own account of its history also lists the Riviera, 414, 111, Lido, 320, 420, 107, 520, 360, and 431 among later additions to the range. The Bianca 414, a larger "Mega-Aphrodite," was introduced in 1980 for the US market, where the Aphrodite 101 was considered a little too small to succeed there.
The Aphrodite 101 ran on a separate track entirely. Its prototype, the Elvstrøm Mungo 95, was built and launched in Halmstad, Sweden, in 1976; it did not meet Danish craftsmanship standards, so it was sent to a small Langeland boatbuilder, Langeland Yacht Service, which lengthened the hull by 60 centimeters and renamed it Aphrodite 101 for its new 10.10-meter length (a later handicap-rule adjustment trimmed 15 centimeters back off, though the name stuck). Bianca Yachts in Rudkøbing then took over production, even though the yard had until then been known mainly for wooden boats, and sped it up considerably: by the late 1980s it had built roughly 360 Aphrodite 101s, exported to other Nordic and European countries and, in smaller numbers, to the United States. Bianca stopped producing the Aphrodite 101 around 1987, apparently for financial reasons. Bachs Yachts, in Farsø, Denmark, took over production in 1988, and Ott Yacht, in Germany, acquired the rights in 1994, building the boat through Aars Yachts in Denmark under Ott Wassersport's management to strict class specifications.
Who Bianca is for
Bianca suits sailors drawn to small Danish family-yard history over an active production line: buyers of the long-keeled Bianca 27 cruiser that carried the family's own name, and buyers of the Aphrodite 101 one-design, a boat whose hull may trace to any of three different builders across its production run. Either way, the current Bianca Yacht is a repair and brokerage operation, not a builder to call for a new boat.
