The Making of BeCool, the First Swan 128

This far north in Finland, the morning air is laden with cold, even in May. The weather is unpredictable, especially in the Gulf of Bothnia where the town of Jakobstad (Pietarsaari in Finnish) sits on a latitude of 63° 40’N. On this particular morning, a team of shipyard workers sit anxiously studying the movement of the thin clouds that hover above the bay, wondering if the conditions will be right for their slated mission.

“For sure, the weather is an important factor on a day like this,” says Kim Sundkvist, Project Manager at Nautor Swan, one of the world’s premier sailing boat builders and certainly the most famous one in the upper latitudes. From Jakobstad, you could reach the Arctic Circle (66° 34’N) by lunchtime if you started driving early in the morning.

“We can’t have too much wind, which was actually the case two days ago,” he notes, as the shipyard prepares its second attempt to launch the first Swan 128, named BeCool.

The massive crane, one of Havator’s biggest, can lift 600 tonnes and needs to be booked months in advance as it’s one of the only models in the Nordic region that can handle such a job.

The different parts of the lattice boom crawler crane had arrived on multiple lorries and been assembled onsite in preparation for the job of taking the 128ft-long hull from its cradle, hoisting it into the morning sky, over concrete and into the sea.

“One thing that gets the adrenaline going is when the boat is lifted off the build cradle,” he says. “We make a lot of calculations, so the slings are well positioned on the crane and it’s well balanced. However, it’s still exciting to see whether we got our calculations right!”

The slings are placed in their appointed position. The crane operator — having raised the massive lattice boom — awaits the crew on the deck to fasten the lifting brace. The final check is done: heads nod, walkie talkies give the signal. It’s time and the lifting of the 39 metre hull begins.

DESIGN, PLUG AND MOULD (2022-23)

Launch day was among the latter landmarks in the build story of the first Swan 128. The model features naval architecture by veteran Germàn Frers — who has designed for Swan since 1981 — while Lucio Micheletti handled deck and coachroof styling, with Misa Poggi designing the interiors.

To tell a fuller story of what goes into building a Swan 128, we look back at the design and build process, which in this case stemmed from a Swan 98 owner looking for a bigger yacht. “This owner was very much involved in the design process, mainly on the general arrangements and the exterior,” Sundkvist says. “He had input on how he would like to see the boat.”

The design process went through what Sundkvist describes as a ‘couple of loops’, as a hull was designed and provisional interior layouts drawn, before additions such as the requirement of a laundry room added 4 feet to the original 124-foot hull.

As it was the first model of an all-carbon yacht, a mould was required. In fact, Nautor Swan is one of the few shipyards in the world able to build a full-carbon mould of this size. (In contrast, no mould was needed for the aluminium hull built in the Netherlands for Swan’s upcoming Alloy 44, which is being finished in Italy and scheduled to debut in 2028.)

In June 2022, half a year since initial discussions and designs began, Nautor Swan began producing the largely wooden plug for the Swan 128 mould at its plug-and-mould facility in the small village of Kållby, about a 15-minute drive southeast of the shipyard’s main Boatbuilding Technology Center (BTC) in Jakobstad.

As the base shape for the mould, the plug is built upside-down or ‘bottom up’ and is eventually sanded and laminated to become vacuum tight. The full-carbon mould was then created by laying up and infusing a monolithic full carbon laminate over the plug.

The plug-and-mould process continued through January 2023, when the still-upside-down plug and mould, as well as external supports, were transported by road to the BTC at the end of the month.

In their new home in Jakobstad, the plug-and-mould structure was rotated 180 degrees until it was the ‘right way up’, before the mould was then separated from the plug in two halves on February 8, 2023. (Prepared for hull one, the mould was also used later for the second Swan 128, which is scheduled to launch in May 2026.)

HULL AND DECK (2023)

Like all Maxi Swans, the Swan 128 is built in full carbon and requires multiple steps, starting with lamination of the hull shell. Both hull and deck manufacturing is based on Sprint© with carbon prepreg fabrics and epoxy resin in a sandwich featuring Corecell core. All materials are engineered and produced by Gurit.

The hull and deck manufacturing process includes a two-stage post-curing process in a digitally controlled oven for about 20 hours, with a characteristic temperature curve up to 90°C, then a final structural assembly post-cure.

With the cured hull still in the mould, Swan installed carbon bulkheads, girders, keel floors, topside stringers and other parts of the internal skeleton. Once the hull structure was effectively self-supporting, it was ‘de-moulded’ in August 2023, with the mould halves removed, like they were earlier from the wooden plug.

In November 2023, the fully faired, pinkish hull was transported by lorry to the paint shed, where it received what Sundkvist describes as the blue ‘sho

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