Weekend warrior?
Having been obsessed with yachts from an early age, many early notebooks of mine are filled with sketches of dream boats. Being a child and unfettered by the constraints of practicality and common sense, these drawings were often pretty alarming to look at; towering masts raked at wild angles and supporting clouds of sail. Hulls that looked like they were designed for re-entry from outer space. Observing them with the wisdom of age, they look kind of fun but also are quite clearly impractical. Imagine therefore my surprise to be confronted with one of my boyhood sketches sitting at the end of a pontoon in the Stockholm archipelago. I blinked, rubbed my eyes yet there it was, the Shogun 50; a boat every bit as wild as any childhood daydreams and looking as at home amidst a sea of staid Swedish cruising yachts as a visitor from Tralfamadore would at a parish council meeting. The boat looks alien and otherworldly and, from the sharply raked dreadnought bow with dramatic wave deflectors, through to the massive rig placed a long, long way aft. The lines are so aggressive that this isn’t so much a yacht as a sabre designed to slash through the water.
This is the Shogun 50; a boat so un-Swedish I was left gasping for air at first viewing and opening and closing my mouth like a landed fish. The boat is the brain child of Mats Bergryd, a racing sailor and businessman who previously owned a ClubSwan 50. He was dissatisfied with certain elements of
