BALTIC 80 MIDNIGHT SUN

This was one of the first large, fully composite racing yachts in the world. Midnight Sun was built as an 80ft Maxi under the IOR rule for an owner who had raced smaller yachts in the Admiral’s Cup under the Swedish flag and wanted to move to the maxi arena populated then by great names such as Kialoa 1V, Windward Passage, Boomerang and Condor.

Midnight Sun’s naval architecture was by Doug Peterson and her interior layout and structural engineering by Baltic Yachts’ in-house designers.

Midnight Sun proved especially fast in upwind conditions and enjoyed considerable success against the ‘big guns’ in the Maxi class particularly in her early days at the 1983 Southern Ocean Racing Conference (SORC) in Florida, one of the great Maxi playgrounds.

Her composite construction consisted mainly of unidirectional rovings over an especially light, end-grain balsa core. When she retired from racing she was successfully converted into a luxury cruising yacht.