Sirena sailboats: a Finnish yard's Nordic cruiser-racers, sold into Italy
Sirena Yachts is the brand under which a single Finnish yard, Lito Marin, built cruising-racers through the 1980s, most of them drawn by one Swedish design firm and exported into the Italian market. The line's identity is straightforward once its three models are sorted by designer rather than by name: two carry a documented credit, and one does not.
Origins and ownership
Lito Marin built the line under the Sirena Yachts brand name. The Sirena 38 was imported into Italy by Adria Yacht of Rimini, and an Italian classic-boat retrospective in Giornale della Vela described its arrival as bringing a "Nordic" style to the Italian nautical market of the era.
The designers
Håkan Södergren founded his design firm, Södergren Yachts, in Stockholm in 1972; his other credits include the Lady Helmsman and Lord Helmsman yachts. His own portfolio lists both the Sirena 38 and the Sirena 44 among his work and states that the Sirena yachts built in Finland were important to his design practice. In his own account, the 38 was a Gotland Runt offshore-race winner that "sold in great numbers."
The line's third model, the Sirena 40, is credited in our catalog to David Pedrick — a pairing no available source confirms. Pedrick's own firm, Pedrick Yacht Designs, was founded in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1977; nothing in its own record ties it to Sirena.
Construction
The 38 is the best-documented hull in the line, per the Italian retrospective: hull and deck built in sandwich fiberglass with a balsa core, a fixed lead keel bulb through-bolted to the hull with stainless steel, and a fiberglass rudder reinforced around a steel core with a stainless-steel shaft. It also carries a self-tacking jib meant to ease upwind sailing in narrow waters. Roughly 80 examples were built, in a production run that began around 1980 and continued into the mid-1980s.
Who Sirena is for
Buyers drawn to a Nordic-styled offshore cruiser-racer of the early 1980s, particularly one with a self-tacking rig suited to shorthanded upwind work, will find the Sirena 38 the line's most fully documented boat. The Sirena 44, from the mid-1980s, shares Södergren's design credit and Finnish origin but comes with far less documented detail. The Sirena 40's design authorship remains unresolved.
