Salona sailboats: a Croatian cruiser-racer built around one structural idea
Salona Yachts has built high-performance cruiser-racers in Solin, Croatia, since 2002, under the AD Boats name. Its range spans roughly 9 to 14 metres, with one outsized flagship-class yacht beyond that span, and across all of it the yard has kept one structural idea constant while handing the rest of the design brief to a changing cast of naval architects: an internal stainless-steel frame, bonded inside the hull, that carries the loads of keel, mast and rigging on every boat it builds.
Origins and ownership
Salona is also counted among Prevent Group's boatbuilding investments. One of the yard's early cruiser-racers, the Salona 45, was - per Cruising World - the Croatian plant's first offering to the U.S. sailboat market. Marin Donadini became CEO of Salona Yacht and AD Boats around the 2020 announcement of the brand's new flagship, the Salona 460.
The designers
J&J Design - the Jakopin brothers' naval-architecture studio in Slovenia - has worked closely with Salona from its foundational models onward, drawing the yard's mainstream range and, later, its 2020 flagship. A different pairing produced the largest boat Salona has built: the Salona 60, manufactured under the AD Boats/Salona name and listed in Ker Yacht Design's own project portfolio with a build year of 2013, its construction material given as GRP/vinyl ester/cored. Cossutti Yacht Design entered the picture in 2016, when Salona's shipyard in Split announced a cooperation with Maurizio Cossutti's Italian design office for a new model, the Salona 380; Cossutti later returned to redesign the deck of the Salona 39.
Construction through the eras
The stainless-steel frame is the constant across Salona's range: on every boat, a glued-in steel frame is bonded inside the hull to add stiffening and distribute loads from the keel, mast and rigging, and, in later accounts, is described as an extended, galvanised structure to which the keel and shrouds connect directly. Hulls and decks are built as a vacuum-infused GRP sandwich, using a foam core and vinyl ester resin; in the most heavily loaded areas, around the keel, rudder shaft and shrouds, the laminate gets additional carbon-fibre reinforcement. The Salona 380 carried its own construction detail beyond that shared formula: three keel options - a standard cast-iron fin with a lead bulb at 2.05 metres of draft, a racing lead-and-steel version at 2.25 metres, and a shallow-draft version - built to the strict standard rules of Germanischer Lloyd's Ocean A category.
Lines and generations
The mainstream range has moved in steps: the Salona 38, introduced in 2011 as a replacement for the 37, was itself replaced in 2016 by the Cossutti-designed Salona 380, and the 380 was updated into the Salona 39 for 2022. The 380 also introduced two design signatures Cossutti's own project record credits to it: a coachroof-window shape "studied to recall the 'S' of Salona," and a stern bathing platform the record calls a novelty for Salona when it first appeared on that model. Separately, Salona's flagship line has run from the 44 to the 46 - recorded elsewhere as the 460 - which arrived in 2020 to replace the 44 and added an electric propulsion option uncommon among performance cruisers. By the time the 460 arrived, the 380 - launched in 2016 - was, at close to five years old, still the yard's most recent new design. The Salona 60 sits outside both lines entirely: an outsized, Ker-designed flagship-class yacht against which the rest of Salona's range looks modest by comparison.
Who Salona is for
Salona suits buyers drawn to a performance cruiser-racer built to one structural formula, choosing instead by size and by which design house shaped a particular era - from J&J's mainstream cruiser-racers, through Cossutti's newer 380/39 line, to Ker's flagship 60 and the electric-optioned 46 at the top of the cruising range.
