Baia Is Back!

One of the iconic sport and performance cruisers and yachts builders Baia is back.  For those that know, Baia is one of the most iconic builders from Italy, which wrote history for its innovation onwards from the seventies, but also for competing and winning some important races in its glorious past, including the 1990 Venezia to Monte Carlo with a production B50.  

Baia wrote history many times, from being the first to build a traditional gozzo cruiser with a planning hull, offering surface drives propulsion on a production boat with the B33, to its innovative removable hard-top system as presented first on the 48 Flash in 1998, and being the first to offer an invisible patio door on the 78 Atlantica in 2003. 

This Baia return is a bit different to the original.  The first difference is that of moving construction away from Baia in Naples to which the previously named Mericraft gave its name in the late seventies, with the new yachts being build further up North the Tyrrhenian sea in Viareggio, Tuscany.  The second difference needs a bit more time to understand, with this new version of Baia so far seeming to focus into large sized super sport yachts upwards of 24 meters.  The first yacht currently under construction is actually an 84 Altantica, with a Magnifica 112 being presented as project.  It will be interesting if Baia will focus solely on this size or if its previous bread and butter thirteen to eighteen meter sport yacht size offer will return.

Baia was an important part of the classic open sport yacht and cruiser success in the Mediterranean and beyond in the eighties and nineties, part of the triumvirate of classic open yachts along with Itama and Magnum, shaping the genre to its iconic status which still has a lot of fans today.  The duel of the classics trio still exists today between a Baia B40, Itama 38, and Magnum 40.  

Up until the Great Recession of 2008, Baia was actually the top seller of the genre of traditional inspired sport cruisers and yachts, with models like the 48 Flash, 54 Aqua, and 63 Azzurra being huge hits for the Naples boat and yacht builder in the noughties.