Finnsailer sailboats: a Finnish motorsailer line built inside an industrial conglomerate
Finnsailer was never an independent yard's own name -- it was the sailboat product line of Turun Veneveistämö Oy, a Finnish shipbuilder also known in English as Turku Boatyard or Åbo Båtvarf, which went on to become a subsidiary of the industrial group Oy Fiskars Ab. That corporate lineage, more than any single designer or model, defines the brand's history.
Origins and ownership
Turun Veneveistämö Oy was founded in 1955, majority-owned by Risto Pohjanheimo at 59 percent alongside Åke Andrée at 40 percent, and began building fiberglass leisure boats -- together with rescue and patrol craft -- in Turku in 1957, relocating to the yard's Pihlajaniemi site from 1963. In 1964, creditor Oy Telko Ab took the company over and sold it outright to Oy Fiskars Ab. The yard was formally dissolved as a separate legal company in 1973, but its boatbuilding work continued afterward as a Fiskars profit unit under a secondary trade name. Tough competition eventually ended Fiskars' leisure-boat production entirely in 1981, after which the operation refocused on rescue and official vessels along with other molded-plastic products.
Construction through the eras
The Finnsailer 35, introduced in the early seventies, took its hull lines from a traditional Baltic pilot boat and was later relaunched as the 36 in the late 1970s with better sailing performance and an added aft cabin. The Finnsailer 29, built at the Turku yard -- and, catalogs note, at other yards as well -- in that same early-seventies period, came from British maritime architect Angus S. Primrose. Finnish maritime architect Hans Groop designed the later Finnsailer 34, launched in 1978 with a hand-laid fiberglass hull and deck and a mahogany interior. By the time of the Finnsailer 30, the builder of record was Oy Fiskars Ab directly rather than the dissolved Turun Veneveistämö entity, reflecting the 1973 shift to in-house production; catalog records also place a Finnsailer 38 in the lineup from 1976, with no designer of record.
Who Finnsailer is for
A Finnsailer buyer is really buying a piece of Finnish industrial history as much as a boat: a fiberglass motorsailer line built at a shipyard that passed from its founding owners to a creditor to Oy Fiskars Ab, drawn by two different outside designers -- Primrose on the 29, Groop on the 34 -- as well as by the yard's own in-house work on models like the 30 and 38, before the line was discontinued in 1981. That ownership arc, shipyard to creditor to conglomerate subsidiary to discontinued product line, is as much the story here as any single hull.
