Degerö sailboats: a two-model Finnish lineage split between a founder-built long keeler and an outside-designed deck-saloon
Degerö sailboats come from Degerö Boat Oy, a small Finnish shipyard whose two-model lineage splits cleanly along a single line: one boat designed and refined in-house by the company's own founders, the other drawn by an outside naval architect. That split, more than any single hull, is the story of the brand.
Origins and ownership
Degerö Boat Oy is based in Tähtelä, in the municipality of Inkoo, Finland, and was founded in June 1980 by Risto Kristeri and Seppo Mäkelä, two men who had already known each other for decades before going into business together, according to Länsi-Uusimaa. The regional newspaper's coverage of the yard's 40th anniversary in June 2020 reported that roughly 30 of Degerö's boats had by then found their way as far as Japan, and that the company was looking for a successor to carry the business forward.
The designers
The two design credits attached to Degerö's lineup describe different roles rather than competing claims. Kristeri and Mäkelä designed the yard's debut model, the Degerö 28 MS (1981), themselves, and the boat has stayed in continuous production since. For the larger Degerö 35 S (1985), the yard turned outside: Håkan Södergren designed the boat, which is CE certified for category A and rated for eight persons. Later, in 2014, Finnish designer Klaus Somerkoski worked with Degerö Boat on a new design, an effort the business paper Kauppalehti framed as aiming to give Finnish boatbuilding a boost rather than buying in a design from a famous international office.
Construction through the eras
The 28 MS carried a genuine long keel at a time when, YACHT magazine observed, that hull type had fallen out of fashion at most yards; the shipyard itself liked to market the boat with the slogan "Mercedes on the water," the magazine reported. Over the years the 28 MS gained a higher mast, a deeper keel, and a larger rudder to sharpen its sailing characteristics. The 35 S took a different path: a hand-laid GRP hull with a balsa sandwich above the waterline, integral longitudinal and transverse beams, hand-bonded structural bulkheads, and a steel-plate-reinforced engine bed, with its lead keel bolted to a moulded hull extension by eight 24mm stainless bolts and its GRP deck laid up the same way over a balsa core. Below decks, the standard interior is finished in satin-varnished Burmese teak and teak-faced plywood, with mahogany offered as an option.
Who Degerö is for
A Degerö buyer is choosing between two distinct boats from one small Finnish yard: an early-eighties long keeler designed and refined in-house by the company's own founders, or a mid-eighties deck-saloon cruiser drawn by an outside naval architect and finished with the same hand-laid, teak-detailed construction throughout.
