Wasa sailboats: a Swedish yard measured on one designer's line
Wasa Yachts has built sailboats in Södertälje since the early 1970s, and the same family has owned it the whole time. By the yard's own account, it has built just over 500 boats since the mid-1970s, and all but three are still sailing. Nearly every one of them carries the same designer's hand: Leif Ängermark, whose work the yard describes as beautiful, well-sailing, and easy to handle, equally suited to racing and family cruising.
Origins and ownership
Hans Marklund founded the yard in the early 1970s and still owns it, now together with Tommy Planeryd, from a site at the entrance to the Södertälje Canal. The line began with the Wasa 55, which Wasa itself calls the "Ur-Wasa" -- the original Wasa -- a collaboration between naval architect Harry Becker and Leif Ängermark in the mid-1970s that borrowed some of its lines from Becker's earlier skärgårdskryssare 55 but was fitted with a modern short keel and separate rudder. Its debut at the 1975 Tjörn Runt race was a success: Ängermark's own boat, Rangrök III, finished first in a record time of four hours forty minutes, a mark a Wasa 55 broke again in 1977. The 55 went on to sail the transatlantic OSTAR, TWOSTAR, and BOC races, and 67 were eventually built. Ängermark stayed at the center of the range afterward, sometimes with a co-designer: Hans Leander worked alongside him on the Wasa 38, 41, and Atlantic, and the brothers Bennet and Bertil Törner helped develop the Wasa 410. The 38 was Marklund and Ängermark's direct answer to the IOR racing rule, and it opened with an overall win at the prestigious Kieler Woche in June 1982 -- a debut the yard credits to Ängermark and Leander's choice to build it, in their words, "their own way": light. When IOR gave way to the IMS rule, Ängermark went back to the drawing board and drew the Wasa 41, a 12.5-metre fast sailer aimed at racing-minded owners, developed under the firm name Leif Ängermark Marin.
Construction through the eras
Wasa's own account emphasizes traditional Swedish craftsmanship built to high quality standards, and every boat in the line is CE-marked and classed for Ocean sailing Category A. From the 55 onward, hulls were molded in one piece without a center seam, a method the yard credits with markedly increased strength in groundings and other heavy loads. Laminate thickness varied by model: the Wasa 370's bottom laminate runs roughly 40mm of homogeneous GRP, far thicker than what's typical on boats of comparable size. The Wasa 41 went further, pairing a balsa-cored sandwich hull and deck with a substantial share of Twaron aramid fiber woven into the glass -- a material choice unique to that model -- and it shipped with an ABS certificate guaranteeing its scantlings, a requirement for offshore racing categories zero through two. The Wasa Atlantic likewise used balsa sandwich construction, with a homogeneous GRP keel strip up to 75mm thick at its heaviest; its first owners built the hull plug themselves at the Södertälje yard. Production wasn't confined to one site: the Wasa 40 was built mostly at a Wasa yard in Gothenburg, and beginning in autumn 1985 the Wasa 34's hulls were produced at Vordingborg Yachts in Denmark -- a version the yard found was not particularly popular in the Danish and German market -- while WASA Marin in Södertälje kept building a racer/cruiser version of the same model for Swedish buyers.
Lines and generations
The range runs from an entry-level boat to substantial offshore cruisers. The Wasa 270, launched in 1982 at 8.3 metres (about 28 feet) as an affordable option for young, racing-minded sailors, is the only Wasa with a plastic base interior; just under twenty were built through the mid-1980s. Ängermark drew the Wasa 30 with less displacement and less wetted surface purely for speed, and a 1980 Wasa 30 proved it by winning every race and the event overall on corrected time in the magazine Båtnytt's One-of-a-Kind regatta; 62 were built between 1978 and the mid-1980s. (For both the 30 and the 55, the model number refers to measured sail area in square metres, not length.) The Wasa 360, launched around the turn of the 1980s as Ängermark's inroad against the IOR rule, became one of Wasa's best-sellers at around 100 built; a period advertisement credited it with an overall win in Scandinavia's toughest offshore race, the 1981 Skaw Race. A group of Wasa 55 owners wanting something bigger and faster prompted the Wasa Atlantic, continuing Ängermark and Leander's narrow, low-displacement, 7.5-tonne concept; about twenty were built. The Wasa 420 followed a similar owner-driven path -- designed for a customer who wanted two separate sleeping areas each with its own shower and toilet -- and launched in 1987 as a near-twin of the Wasa 410 with raised freeboard; the yard's own figures for how many were built vary, from around 25 to 29. The Wasa 530, one of the newest in the family and nearly named Wasa Pacific before launch, was built in seven examples, the last in 2005; Wasa's own Hans Marklund called it "a 53-foot long-distance boat... there's nothing that needs to be reinforced, you just set sail and go."
Who Wasa is for
A Wasa buyer is choosing a small, still family-owned Swedish yard with one designer's signature across most of its range, from a 28-foot entry boat to a 53-foot ocean cruiser. Every model was built to the same CE Ocean Category A standard, and by the yard's own count nearly all of the roughly 500 boats it has built are still sailing -- a range shaped as much by racing-rule changes and individual owners' requests as by any fixed size or style.
