Vindö sailboats: a small family yard's journey from wood to fiberglass
Vindö is named for the island where a family boatyard on Sweden's west coast built cruising sailboats for roughly six decades. Founder Carl Andersson, trained as a boatbuilder's apprentice at the Plym yard in Neglinge, Stockholm, returned to Orust in 1926 and began building boats on his own account at Nötesund, on the island of Vindön, under the name Sundsandviks Båtvarv. The yard's boats didn't carry the Vindö name until 1961, when Andersson launched the Vindö 28 -- a milestone, per a Vindö Yacht Club history. In the decades that followed, the yard converted from wood to fiberglass, weathered two bankruptcies, and for a few years around 1960 employed a young German boatbuilder, Christoph Rassy, who went on to found Hallberg-Rassy.
Origins and ownership
Andersson's own father had run a boatyard at Svineviken, and Andersson helped make small wooden pins there from an early age, according to a talk by his daughter recorded by the Tjörn heritage society. By the mid-1950s, Andersson's son Karl-Erik had joined the business at Nötesund, having trained as a naval-architecture engineer in Gothenburg and apprenticed at the Eriksberg shipyard. In 1960, as his health declined, Carl Andersson handed management to Karl-Erik, who continued the business under the name Nötesunds Varv AB. Even after stepping back, the elder Andersson kept contributing: after his wife died in 1963, the 70-year-old, whose hands trembled from a genetic condition, began seriously helping Karl-Erik with construction drawings for various boats, work he continued until he was 86. He died in 1979.
That same year, around ten German boatbuilders found work at Nötesund, after there weren't enough boatbuilders available locally. Among them was 26-year-old Christoph Rassy, who later recalled writing to yards on Orust -- two didn't respond, two responded negatively -- before Karl-Erik Andersson invited him to come immediately to Nötesund. Rassy arrived by train to Uddevalla early on 20 January 1960 and lived with Karl-Erik for several years, calling it "fantastic" how well he was looked after. In 1965, when Harry Hallberg moved to larger premises in Ellös, Rassy -- helped by Gothenburg boat buyer Axel Arneklev -- took over Hallberg's vacated Kungsviken yard and started the company that became Hallberg-Rassy.
The yard itself went bankrupt in 1980 and was put up for sale. Three former employees bought it, renaming it Vindö Marina, keeping its roughly 80 employees on. To diversify beyond boatbuilding, the new owners took on subcontract work, prefabricating interior modules for Omega and clothing the steel hull of Lady Ellen, a 36-metre replica of the museum ship Ellen of Skärhamn now on display at San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. Among the staff retained was designer John Lindblom, later of Storebro, whose new design became the Vindö 45. A harder chapter followed: the Swedish state maritime museum's record dates a second bankruptcy to 1987, while a Norwegian trade-magazine account places the renewed collapse around 1985, with production winding down by 1987. That account describes two sailing enthusiasts starting an operation called Windö Sweden, which kept building the Vindö 45 and introduced one further model, the Vindö 995 -- only five completed. What followed shifted from building boats to servicing them: today's Vindö Marin, a separate business by its own account, traces its lineage to the 1926 founding and cites a maintenance-and-repair division set up by the 1970s as its basis.
The designers
Carl Andersson designed the yard's early boats himself: the Vindö 28 in 1961, the Vindö 30 and smaller Vindö 18 in 1963, and the Vindö 22 in 1964. He later designed the Vindö 40, completed in 1971, and the Vindö 65, offered in sailer, motorsailer, and Mix variants. For the 1975 Vindö Corsair 75, the yard partnered with English builder Tyler for a 46-foot hull designed by Holman & Pye -- known in England as the Bowman 46 -- fitted out in classic Vindö style; deliveries proved unreliable and the project petered out after only a few examples. After the 1980 bankruptcy, John Lindblom took up the pen for a new design that became the Vindö 45 of 1981 -- called "the finest Vindö yet" by one boat journalist at the time.
Construction through the eras
The yard built in wood through the 1960s, and its first contact with fiberglass came in 1960, when it built the interior for the Enderlein-designed Scandinavian Queen, a 12-metre cruiser whose hull was molded in Finland. Vindö also built the wooden plugs for the first Vegan (a 1965 Per Brohäll design) and for the Marieholm IF, work that taught it what fiberglass construction required. The Vindö 18 became the last of the yard's original models to reach fiberglass form, in 1965, with the Vindö 30 following from 1966. Vindö never molded its own fiberglass hulls, though: it partnered first with the newly started Lysekils båtvarv, which worked full time for years molding hulls for Vindö, and later with Lyse Plastprodukter, a firm with other customers too. The changeover wasn't universally welcomed inside the yard -- much of the Vindö 40 was made of plastic, which, according to a Tjörn heritage-society account, one of the Anderssons disliked. The very first Vindö 40, completed in 1971 as a sailing plug, was also the last wooden boat to leave the yard; roughly 400 examples followed.
Lines and generations
Vindö's range split into distinct chapters. Carl Andersson's early 1960s boats -- the 28, 30, 18, and 22 -- were small cruisers built through the yard's wood-to-fiberglass conversion. The 1970s brought larger, costlier boats: the Vindö 40, the more affordable Vindö 32 of 1973, the English-hulled Corsair 75, the well-traveled Vindö 65 (more than 40 built, mostly exported to Germany and the Mediterranean), and the yawl-rigged Vindö 90, the range's largest at 15 to 20 built, mostly for export. After 1980, the range narrowed to John Lindblom's Vindö 45 and, later, the Windö Sweden-built Vindö 995.
Who Vindö is for
A Vindö suits a buyer drawn to a small, family-run Swedish yard's story as much as to any single hull -- one where the founder kept drafting boats into his eighties, where German craftsmen briefly worked alongside a future Hallberg-Rassy founder, and where roughly half the Vindö 30 production went abroad, some 200 boats reportedly reaching Lake Constance alone. The range spans small early-1960s daysailers through substantial 1970s motorsailers and a yawl built mostly for export, so buyers should expect real variety in size and purpose, not one consistent hull shape.
