Alice

A Family Boat Built Like a Race Boat

Alice is a 37.08 metre custom sloop, launched in May 2026 and handed over to her owner on 28 August 2026, making her one of the largest yachts Baltic has delivered in the last several years and, by length, comfortably a superyacht. Naval architecture and exterior styling are by Malcolm McKeon Yacht Design, with interiors by the English studio Adam Lay Studio. Both are established names in this size of custom sailing yacht rather than newcomers, and the pairing reflects a build that leans toward proven partners over experimental ones, in keeping with the owner's brief.

Construction is all-carbon, hull, deck and superstructure, which is standard practice for Baltic at this size but still unusual across the wider superyacht sailing fleet, where most yards of comparable output default to GRP or a mix of carbon and glass. Light displacement is reported at 109 tonnes with 35 tonnes of ballast, on a beam of 8.3 metres and a design waterline of 33.8 metres. For a hull this long, that is a genuinely light boat, which is precisely the point of building it in carbon rather than glass.

The Keel That Does Two Jobs

The single feature that coverage of Alice keeps returning to is her telescopic keel, a NACA-profiled fin that extends from 4.15 metres in its raised position to 6.4 metres fully lowered, a swing of 2.25 metres. Raised, she can get into anchorages and marinas that would turn away most yachts her size. Lowered, she gets the ballast down low enough to sail with genuine offshore stability and upwind performance. It is not a new idea in principle, lifting or canting keels have appeared on smaller performance boats for years, but building the mechanism into a 37 metre, 109 tonne cruising yacht and having it work reliably enough to hand to a family owner is a harder engineering problem than it sounds, and it is the part of this build that most directly reflects Baltic's carbon and composite engineering base.

The rest of the yacht is built around making that keel, and the boat generally, usable by a small crew rather than a professional delivery team. The mainsail furls hydraulically into the boom, the halyard runs on a captive system and the headsails use Reckmann furling gear, all specified so the boat can go from tied up at the dock to sailing in a matter of minutes, according to the delivery team who took her out. That combination of shorthanded sail handling and a keel that adapts to the cruising ground is the actual substance behind the family-cruising brief, more than any single luxury feature aboard, and it is the kind of detail that only shows up once a boat has actually been sailed rather than just launched.

She performs and manoeuvres like a much smaller high-performance sailing yacht, and it takes only a few minutes from casting off to setting sail.

A Glass Deckhouse and a Deliberately Domestic Interior

Above decks, Alice carries a contemporary glass deckhouse with extensive glazing and a fixed bimini, giving close to panoramic views from the saloon while still offering shade and weather protection at anchor, a detail that matters more on a boat meant for long stretches of family time aboard than it would on a pure racer. Below, Adam Lay Studio has gone for a warm, domestic-feeling interior rather than the minimal, monochrome look common on modern superyachts: brushed walnut, textured veneers with a water-ripple pattern, natural fabrics and wall lighting inspired by tree branches. The studio has described the intent as choosing materials and textures that reward a closer look, which is a fair description of a boat meant to be lived on rather than shown off.

The owner's brief, as described by the build team, was explicitly for extensive family cruising on safe and reliable systems using well-proven technologies rather than untested ones, a notably conservative ask from a yard that had just spent several years putting a deployable racing foil on Canova. Alice answers that brief with a boat that is technically ambitious in exactly one place, the keel, and deliberately unadventurous everywhere else, which is arguably a harder balance to strike than building something that pushes every envelope at once.

Delivery, the People Behind Her and What Is Still Unknown

The project was run for the owner by A2B Marine Projects, with Daniel Calascione representing the owner's interests and Tommy Johansson serving as Baltic's project manager on the build. Delivery captain Ryan Taylor, who sailed Alice on her handover passage, has said she performs and manoeuvres like a much smaller high-performance sailing yacht, and that it takes only a few minutes from casting off to setting sail, both practical, specific claims rather than brochure language, and both consistent with the shorthanded sail-handling package described above. As of this research Alice was tracked in the waters near Port Bannatyne, Scotland, beginning the cruising her owner built her for, having travelled north from the yard in Finland by way of her own delivery passage rather than on a transport ship.

What is genuinely not known, because Baltic does not publish it for one-off custom builds, is the detail a buyer researching this class of yacht usually wants most: engine make and power, generator capacity, fuel and fresh water tankage and any contract or build price. None of that has been released by the yard or the owner's project team, and because Alice is a single private delivery with no sister-ship and no charter program, there is also no resale data and no independent owner or charter-guest review to weigh against the build team's own account. That is a normal state of affairs for a brand-new Baltic custom, but it is worth saying plainly rather than filling the gap with a guess, and it is precisely the kind of information gap that separates a bespoke one-off from a series yacht with a decade of accumulated owner history behind it.

A chi si rivolge: An experienced owner who wants to cruise far and often as a family, shorthanded if needed, in a boat that sails like a genuine performance yacht rather than a motorsailer, and who is comfortable commissioning a custom one-off without a published price or a track record of other owners to compare notes with.