Bianca 28 Sailboat Review, Specs, and Listings

Slim, heavy, and directionally steady, the Bianca 28 favors settled sailing over quick acceleration or shallow-water access. Her lead long keel contributes to that character, though it also brings compromises in tight harbours.

Design and Construction

The Bianca 28 measures 27.5 feet overall, with a 20-foot waterline. She displaces about 5,070 pounds and carries 2,094 pounds of lead ballast. That gives her a 41 percent ballast ratio, above average for her size class.

The hull is solid fiberglass, and a fiberglass hull of this sort needs only minimal maintenance during the sailing season.

Her underwater profile is defined by a long keel cast in lead rather than iron. Lead is about 44 percent heavier than iron, allowing the designers to use a more compact keel. This reduces wetted surface and adds a little speed without giving up the directional steadiness of a long keel, which naturally offers better directional stability than a comparable fin keel.

That steadiness comes with a genuine trade-off: the Bianca 28 is more awkward to pivot in a tight marina. Depending on load, her draft is roughly 6.6 to 6.9 feet, restricting her to deeper harbours and keeping her out of shallow anchorages that a fin-keel boat might reach.

Hull Form and Performance

The Bianca 28’s numbers describe a deliberately heavy, slender cruiser. Her length-to-beam ratio of 3.23 makes her narrower than 73 percent of comparable designs. Within that slim envelope, the designer appears to have chosen a slightly quicker hull form.

A displacement-length ratio of 282 places her among “heavy cruisers,” with only 34 percent of similar boats rated heavier. That mass, combined with a modest waterplane area, produces slow acceleration but a more settled motion. Her Motion Comfort Ratio is 20.1, just below the class average and more comfortable than 46 percent of similar sailboats.

The 41 percent ballast ratio gives her above-average resistance to heeling. Her capsize screening value is 1.99, which, by that formula alone, would admit her to ocean racing.

Rig and Sail Handling

The Bianca 28 is a masthead sloop, with standing and running rigging that follows period Scandinavian practice. The reference sail plan has a sail-area-to-displacement ratio of 14.6, rising to 17.5 with a 135 percent genoa.

By that measure, she is quicker than 31 percent of similar boats in light air. However, the data also shows that she carries more rig than only 10 percent of her peers, making her significantly underrigged for her displacement. Her Relative Speed Performance rating is 38, placing her ahead of 38 percent of comparable designs.

Halyard and sheet lengths are well documented:

Mainsail and headsail halyards: about 73 feet of 5/16-inch line
Jib and genoa sheets: about 27.5 feet of 3/8-inch line
Mainsheet: 69 feet of 3/8-inch line

Accommodations

Below, the Bianca 28 has five berths and a galley. The arrangement suits a small family or two couples on coastal passages. The heavy-displacement hull that limits acceleration also helps provide a smoother cabin experience at anchor and under way.

Limitations

Draft is the Bianca 28’s principal constraint. At just over six and a half feet when loaded, she is locked out of all but major marinas. Her long keel keeps her steady on a compass course, but it also makes close-quarters handling in confined harbours genuinely more difficult.

Her relatively small sail plan is another limitation. Significantly underrigged for her displacement, she won’t leap onto the plane in a breeze as a lighter boat with a taller rig might.

The Verdict

The Bianca 28 is a thoughtfully proportioned small cruiser from the mid-1970s Danish fiberglass tradition. She is slim, heavy, and directionally sure, with a lead long keel that trades tight-harbour agility for offshore steadiness.

She is an honest coastal and moderate-distance cruiser for an owner who values settled motion and simple hull maintenance more than sprint speed or shallow-water access.

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