Trio sailboats: a small Gothenburg yard's family-boat line
Trio sailboats trace to Triobåtar AB, a small yard in the Gothenburg area of Sweden that built the Trio 80, Trio 92, and Trio 96 across a compressed 1976-to-1983 run. It began as a family-boat project, and the range stayed narrow and closely related: three fiberglass designs from one yard, sold not only as finished boats but as hulls and kits a buyer could complete on their own.
Origins and ownership
Triobåtar AB was owned by two distinct co-owners, Hans Blomstergren and Lennart Blomstergren. The company started out in the Grimbo industrial area on Hisingen, in Gothenburg, where it operated for about two years, before finding workshop premises in Västra Frölunda's Grimmered industrial area, just past the Gnistäng tunnel. The yard operated and flourished in that Grimmered location for roughly five years. According to the yard's own history account, preserved by former employee Kent Ljunggren, the company then ran into financial trouble after "a tragic event in the family" and was ultimately declared bankrupt; the bankruptcy estate was bought up by another shipyard company based on Hönö, where production of the line continued.
The designers
Designer Hans Blomstergren set out to create a pleasant family boat with good sailing characteristics, and that brief shaped the Trio 80, 92, and 96. The yard's catalog wasn't entirely his work, though: it also offered a smaller mini-tonner called the Minit, designed not by Blomstergren but by Holger Formgren and Gary Mull — a separate design credited independently on both the yard's history page and its program listing.
Construction through the eras
Buyers could acquire a Trio three different ways, and that variety left finish quality uneven across the surviving fleet. A boat could be bought fully finished from the yard; bought as a "half-kit," where the buyer received a bare hull and fitted out the interior themselves; or built essentially from scratch, with the buyer renting space at the yard to lay up the fiberglass hull, cast the lead keel, and then finish the boat entirely at home. Interiors, where the yard completed them, used teak-veneered plywood detailed in solid teak sourced from Thailand. Total production across the line is put at around 325 boats, though sources differ on whether that count covers the Trio 80 alone or the whole line.
Lines and generations
The line began with the Trio 80, designed in 1976 and built into the early 1980s at just under 26.5 feet. A larger "big sister," the Trio 92, followed at just over 30 feet and was later reworked into the roughly 31.5-foot Trio 96 by making the stern more reversed and switching to a 7/8 rig — a running redesign of an existing hull rather than a wholesale new model. Hull construction stayed consistent across that growth: both the Trio 92 and the Trio 96 are documented independently as hand-laid fiberglass hulls carrying lead keels.
Who Trio is for
Trio suits a buyer drawn to a small, family-scaled Scandinavian yard with a short, well-documented production run, rather than a marque with a long model history to sort through. The line's whole arc — a couple of rented industrial sheds, a five-year run at its most settled address, then a bankruptcy that ended in-house production — fits a buyer who values that kind of compact, closed history over a builder still adding new models. Because so much of the range was sold as a bare hull or a kit for owner completion, Trio also suits someone comfortable judging an individual boat's build quality on its own terms rather than trusting a uniform factory standard.