Southern Wind Shipyard

A Cape Town Yard With an Italian Accent

Southern Wind Shipyard was founded in Cape Town in 1991 by Willy Persico, an Italian engineer who had run the Italian luxury builder Cantieri Navali Rodriguez until 1990. Persico wanted a yacht for himself, and the search for a naval architect and a yard led him to Ron Holland's design for Aga Jari and to a struggling Cape Town builder called Cenmarine. When Cenmarine collapsed in 1991 Persico bought the yard outright and turned the rescue into a business. The following year Southern Wind signed Farr Yacht Design as its long-term naval architecture partner and launched the SW72 mini-series, the template every later Southern Wind range including the SW96 still follows: composite construction and a semi-custom hull shared across a handful of sisterships.

Persico ran the yard until his death in 2018, after which ownership passed to a group of shareholders and the management team he had built rather than to an outside buyer. Juan Ignacio Entrecanales, executive vice president of the Spanish renewables group Acciona, is among the more visible of those owners and has commissioned four Southern Wind yachts himself. Under that structure the yard kept building: carbon fibre construction and the Nauta Design partnership from 2000, epoxy infusion and a 210 strong workforce by 2005, three piece hull moulds from 2008, a World Superyacht Award for the SW102RS Farfalla in 2015, the first electric-hybrid Southern Wind sailboat (SW96 Nyumba) in 2022 and the flagship SW123 in 2025. Fortissimo, launched the following year, is the newest expression of that same continuous line.

Where the SW96 Sits in the Range

The SW96 succeeds two smaller Southern Wind mini-series, the SW82 (built 2013 to 2019) and the earlier SW94, and runs in parallel with the larger SW105 (2017 to 2025) and its successor the SW108. Southern Wind's current catalogue tops out with the SW123 flagship and also includes the SW100X and the SWCAT90 catamaran, but the SW96 remains the yard's core performance-cruising size: six hulls delivered since 2017 make it the most repeated composite line Southern Wind currently builds. Every SW96 shares the same naval architecture and hull tooling, with each owner choosing layout, keel configuration and finish, which is what Southern Wind calls smart custom rather than full one-off custom.

Fortissimo is hull SW96-06, following Sorceress (2017, the line's first hull and the first Southern Wind yacht with twin rudders), Seatius (2018, an interior design award winner), two further sisterships and Liberty, launched fifth in Cape Town shortly before Fortissimo, plus the electric-hybrid Nyumba. That sequence means Fortissimo is not a prototype: her hull, keel engineering and systems build on nine years of in-service feedback from five earlier owners, even as her forest green metallic hull and racing-biased deck gear mark her out visually and functionally from her sisterships.