Our Luffe 44 Alma

Alma is a Luffe 44 from 1987 built at Luffe Yachts in Kolding, Denmark. She has sail number SWE 39 (originally DEN 39 with the name Bit).

Luffe 44 was originally designed to win what was back then the largest yacht race in the world, Själland Rundt in Denmark. This race attracted over 2000 yachts at its peak in 1984. The Luffe 44 was the outright fastest boat in both 1983, 84 and 85. Luffe Yachts keep designing and building high end sailboats in small volumes but these days their  priority has followed most customers towards cruising. The performance centric design of the Luffe 44 was the main driver for our decision to purchase this boat even if she is now an older boat.

She is obviously much narrower than the latest offshore racing boats but when you look at her underwater lines they are very sleek and fast. Fast and fun also upwind. 13.38 m long, 3.28 m wide and with a depth of 2 m. Official weight from the builder is 5.2 tons but most of them are in reality closer to 6 tons. Alma carries 100 m2 which is slightly more than other Luffe 44´s. Roughly 50 m2 in the Mainsail and another 50 m2 in her Genoa. Downwind we add another 120 m2 with the Spinnaker. She performs very well and we are very happy with both her speed and behavior. Not many boats in Sweden can keep up when you combine this boat with an active crew.

We purchased her in the spring 2014 and we enjoyed sailing her immensely last summer. We sailed around the Stockholm and Åland archipelagos. I will post some pictures from this first summer as soon as possible.

She has spent most of her life as a race boat and almost every aspect of her has been optimized for racing. Most if not all aspects of the boat and sail handling including the complete rig has been updated to the latest standard during the last 10 years with a new rig from Seldens, Harken blocks throughout and Andersen winches. Another great feature from her racing days is that we have 6 Genoas all in 3DL and 8 symmetric and assymetric Spinnakers from North that complement the picture. In spite of being a very demanding sailor I was very positively impressed by the conditions of these sails. I am convinced that most of these sails were used only a few times before we purchased the boat. I don´t expect that we will need to add this type of sails for quite a few years!

Since we purchased her we have added a new Mainsail, again a 3DL carbon/aramid sail from North. Just recently we also added a new Jib, this time in 3Di instead of the 3DL. It is going to be very interesting to follow the life of these two new sails and see how they age. I expect that they will be the most used sails on the boat since most of the sailing is done with our young family and thus we don't have as much weight on the rail as she was originally designed for. The Jib will be used instead of Genoa as soon as we have more than 10 knots of wind.

After sailing the first summer we found that a number of areas important for cruising needed attention, mainly to improve how she was to live on board during extended periods of time with a family and additional friends. With regards to the cruising improvements we have had help from Österskärs Marina during the 2014-2015 winter and they have helped out with a number of interior improvement, most notably new super efficient cool box instead of the old fridge that was very difficult to access when heeling over in the wrong direction. We have also added a vacuum connection for our toilet tank to be compliant with the new Swedish regulation and a whole host of other minor improvements to kitchen, storage and sleeping arrangements.

Looking forward to next season!