Dragonfly sailboats: a Danish family yard's answer to the folding trimaran
For more than half a century, every trimaran to carry the Dragonfly name has come out of the same family-run yard on Denmark's west coast. Quorning Boats has built essentially nothing but trimarans since 1980, and the folding system it introduced in 1989 to solve trailering and berthing is still the mechanical signature of every Dragonfly built today.
Origins and ownership
Brothers Børge and Bent Quorning started building their own yard in the fishing village of Skærbæk, on Denmark's west coast, in August 1967, with the sole aim of building trimarans in Northern Europe. The first boat off the line was the Trident 28, designed by Børge and built in 1968. The brothers parted ways as business partners in 1974; Bent left to start a new yard in Middelfart building the Safir range of powerboats, while Børge continued building his Trident 27 trimarans — GRP foam-sandwich hulls with a balsa core — in growing numbers through the rest of the 1970s.
In 1980, Børge and his son Jens Quorning put the Dragonfly 25 (MK I) into production — the first boat to actually carry the Dragonfly name, and the point at which, by the company's own account, the yard's focus shifted to building trimarans exclusively. The one exception came six years later: a one-off 52-foot monohull, the Vitesse, built to order in 1986 as the fastest monohull in Denmark and, at the time, the largest epoxy boat built in the country.
Jens Quorning became financially involved in the business in 1991 and took over the company from both of his parents, Bit and Børge Quorning, in 1995; Børge retired in 2000 but kept a small workshop at the yard for his own projects. A 1998 fire destroyed the yard's GRP lamination section and damaged other buildings, wiping out a number of production molds. The yard rebuilt and later expanded onto its neighbor's footprint, buying the Faurby Yachts lamination shop next door in 2011 and the rest of Faurby's production facilities in 2013 — space that now houses the Dragonfly Service Center. A third generation joined in August 2021, when Peter Quorning began his apprenticeship at the yard; he became Vice President in late 2024, working alongside his father Jens. Founder Børge Quorning died on March 22, 2022, at 90, shortly after the yard completed its 1,000th trimaran.
The designers
Børge Quorning designed the yard's own boats through the Trident and early Dragonfly years, and worked with his son Jens to design the Swing Wing folding system in 1989. Since 2002, Dragonflys have been designed through a partnership between Jens Quorning and naval architect Steen Olsen, sole owner of Olsen Design. Olsen's role expanded starting with the Dragonfly 35 in 2005, the design that also introduced 3D design technology to Quorning Boats for the first time, replacing the yard's earlier design methods.
Construction through the eras
The early Trident 27 series was built in GRP foam-sandwich construction with a balsa core through the 1970s. Later Dragonflys moved to a Divinycell PVC core: hull shells are hand-laid fiberglass sandwich laminated by X-Yachts at its facility in Poland, while Quorning Boats builds the highly stressed beams and bulkheads itself in Denmark using vacuum infusion. The Dragonfly 920 Cruising, introduced in 1996, was among the yard's earliest production boats to carry a carbon mast as standard equipment.
The constant across all of it has been the Swing Wing system Børge and Jens designed in 1989: folding the beam by more than half in under a minute per side, with no tools, operated entirely from the cockpit, and standard on every Dragonfly since. On the Dragonfly 32 it can be worked by hand or with one or two optional electric winches; the 36 and 40 come standard with four. The system's hinge design changed for the first time with the Dragonfly 36: what had always been a bolted stainless-steel fitting between hull and beams became a single laminated composite piece, CNC-milled to size — a change shipyard owner Jens Quorning says removes the need for hinge adjustment and leaves the boat lighter and easier to maintain.
Lines and generations
The Dragonfly name effectively begins twice: with the 25 MK I in 1980, and again with the folding Dragonfly 800 Swing Wing in 1989, of which the yard built roughly 400 over a 20-year run. From there the range grew through the 920, 1000, and 1200 — the 1200 earning Quorning Boats a Danish Design Award, presented by Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark — and eventually to the 40, unveiled at boot Düsseldorf in 2020. The 1,000th trimaran the yard completed, in 2022, was itself a Dragonfly 25, the 88th boat in that series. The newest addition, the Dragonfly 36, took Jens Quorning and his team roughly two and a half years to develop before its first hull appeared in mid-2024; it debuted a version of the Swing Wing built entirely without metal hinges for the first time in the company's history.
Who Dragonfly is for
Dragonfly draws sailors who want genuine offshore trimaran performance without giving up the ability to trailer, dry out, or fit into a monohull-sized berth — the Swing Wing system exists specifically to let one person fold the boat down solo, without tools. It also draws buyers who value that the yard is still family-run: three generations of Quornings, building beams, bulkheads, rigging, and spars themselves in Denmark, and buying in only the hull-shell lamination, from fellow Danish builder X-Yachts in Poland.
