Targa sailboats: a Finnish motorsailer built to actually sail
Motorsailers of the postwar decades earned a reputation for compromise: undersized rigs that left them going nowhere in light air, paired with hull forms that struggled to make way to windward. Targa Yachts, a small builder based in Jämijärvi, Finland, set out to build one that broke the pattern, and its two sailboats, the Targa 96 and Targa 101, did enough of that to earn genuine respect as sailing boats, not just as motor cruisers.
Origins and ownership
Targa Yachts, based in Jämijärvi, Finland, focused primarily on producing its two sailboats, the Targa 96, from 1975, and the Targa 101, from 1980. Hans Groop designed both. In 1984, the company sold the molds and manufacturing rights for its Targa 25 model -- a boat outside this sailboat lineup -- to Botnia Marin.
Construction through the eras
Groop departed on purpose from the typical motorsailer formula. He grew the sail area and drew tall, narrow rigs, in contrast to the undersized rigs then common on other motorsailer-style boats, and he slimmed the hull and reshaped the underwater lateral plane for efficiency, while keeping a comparatively shallow keel suited to archipelago sailing. The Targa 96 in particular soon gained a reputation, per Kippari, for sailing performance not far behind ordinary sailboats -- a reputation borne out when a heavily modified Targa 96 took a class win at the 1979 Gotland Runt offshore race.
The layout underneath that performance was just as unusual. Placing an open cockpit amidships on the Targa 96 was a rarity among sailboats when the model was introduced, chosen to deliver motor-cruiser-like habitability: the midships position freed room for a proper aft cabin, entered from the cockpit -- itself a rarity, since the low-sided, narrow hulls typical of the era only allowed an aft cabin on much larger boats. Swedish offshore-cruiser builders, among them Hallberg-Rassy and Najad, later adopted the same amidships-cockpit arrangement so diligently that it became almost a signature of their own boats. The Targa 96 was originally fitted with a Volvo Penta engine that Kippari called a generous 25 horsepower.
Who Targa is for
A buyer drawn to Targa is choosing a small-yard motorsailer that took the type's usual compromises seriously and worked to fix them -- a taller rig, a slimmer hull, and a cockpit arrangement that delivered motor-cruiser-like habitability without giving up sailing performance. That combination, more than raw numbers, defines what a Targa 96 or 101 has to offer.
