Comar

Comar builds sailing yachts in Forlì, and in the 1970s and 80s it was the largest production builder in Italy: a yard that began life as Sipla, importing a small French quarter-tonner, and then commissioned a thirty-footer of its own from E. G. Van de Stadt and a young Jean-Marie Finot. Two days before the launch both designers, independently and on the same day, phoned the yard to take their names off the project. The disowned boat went on to win the 1971 Middle Sea Race overall with Cino Ricci at the tiller, and remains the smallest boat ever to do it.

That boat was the Comet 910, and it sold by the hundreds, anchoring a family of Comet cruisers and cruiser-racers that put a generation of Italians on the water. The yard built on that foundation for decades; the used market in Italy still runs on its hulls.