Swan 36 is a fin keeled, fiberglass constructed masthead sloop first manufactured by Nautor's Swan in 1967. The first Swan sailing yacht ever produced by the firm, it was designed to serve recreationally but also compete in the One Ton Cup.
Production continued until 1971, with a total of 90 Swan 36 boats being built.
The 36 was designed by Sparkman & Stephens who were the number one designers in the world at the time and also the designers of the first 775 Swan yachts built by Nautor.
The design is sometimes confused with the 1988 Swan 36 designed by Germán Frers, which is now usually referred to as the Swan 36-2 to differentiate it from the unrelated 1967 Sparkman & Stephens Swan 36 design.
Design
Its main dimensions are length overall LOA 10,9 m, Length of waterline LWL 7,77 Beam 2,95 m, and displacement of 7000 kg, of which 3600 kg is ballast.
Its racing success is
very much based on the designer’s well timed decision to use a separate fin keel and rudder as opposed to the traditional full keel arrangement (a so-called split lateral plane). This reduced the wetted surface area of the hull and thus also the frictional drag, which made the yacht faster, and with the rudder placed further aft also more agile. Despite separate fin keel and a rudder had been used before in some of the Sparkman & Stephens' lighter sailboat designs such as the Lightning, this was the first time this arrangement was successfully used in production keelboats.