Solaris 44Review & Buyer’s Guide: The Boat Nobody Complains About
What you’d actually do with her
This is a fast cruiser for active sailing along a coast and between islands. Typical use: a half-day sail, a weekend with a night in the next bay, and in summer a holiday of passages between islands and harbour towns. Every control leads back to the helm, so a couple can run the boat, and with experience one person can. She sails faster than most cruisers of her size, especially upwind and when the breeze builds: day passages run longer and weather windows open wider. She races in club and one-make events without modification, and some owners have crossed oceans in her. One practical limit: the deep keel rules out shallow anchorages and drying harbours. This is a boat for deep water and long tacks, not for thin lagoons.
The boat nobody complains about
Every boat in this catalogue carries a scar. The Boréal 44 has its stability controversy. The Amel Super Maramu has the eternal argument about ketches. Preparing this dossier, we combed forums in four languages for the scar of the Solaris 44, and found nothing: not one surveyor’s report, not one “here’s what broke” thread. Seven years into the series.
That is either very good news or very awkward news. Good, if the boat is genuinely built so that nothing gives. Awkward, because silence has other explanations: the series is small, the owners are wealthy people who don’t post on forums, and what discussion exists lives in closed groups where no search engine goes. A buyer of a used Solaris 44 enters the market almost without secondhand experience to lean on. This dossier is an attempt to gather the experience that does exist: some thirty hulls, one lost rig, one loud disagreement about a number, and a single word an American boat-test judge wrote in his notebook.
“Beautiful helm. A Ferrari.”
The boat itself is simple in intent: a hull with a soft chine and its beam carried aft, a deep torpedo keel, twin rudders, and every line led under the deck to four winches beside the wheels. The Argentine designer Javier Soto Acebal drew her so that two people, or one, could sail fast without ever letting go of the helm.
The yard among Roman ruins
Solaris builds in Aquileia, a small town at the top of the Adriatic where the slipway is reached by canal and Roman port ruins lie beyond the yard fence. The company has existed since 1974, trading for most of its life as Serigi, and that name still surfaces in the papers of individual hulls. For decades it was a quiet producer of solid, conservative cruisers drawn by Doug Peterson, little known outside Italy.
The turn came when Javier Soto Acebal became chief designer, recommended by Luca Bassani, the founder of Wally. From the mid-2010s the yard released boat after boat in a new language: flush deck, full-width stern, a deck swept clean of hardware. The Solaris 50 took Europe’s Yacht of the Year title in 2016. The 44, unveiled at Cannes in September 2018, inherits that hull thinking directly, sharing its DNA and near-identical cockpit with the 50 and the 55.
One production habit sets Aquileia apart even among louder names: before tooling begins, every new interior is built full-size in wood.
“Solaris is one of the few boat builders that is doing 1:1 mock-ups of the interior of a new boat before building it.”
Among series builders, essentially only Nautor’s Swan works the same way.
What kind of boat is this — if you’re seeing her for the first time
The Solaris 44 is a 13-metre fibreglass sailing yacht conceived for fast cruising by a crew of two. Three things separate her from a charter catalogue.
The whole boat is run from the helm. Halyards, sheets and reefing lines disappear under the deck and emerge at four winches aft, a step from the wheels. The jib is self-tacking on a recessed track; the mainsheet traveller is sunk into the cockpit sole. The deck stays empty, with nothing for a line or a foot to catch on. This is what the yard means by “reduced crew”: one person at the wheel does everything.
Below the waterline, the geometry is a racer’s. A deep T-shaped keel pairs a cast-iron foil with a lead torpedo bulb, and there are two rudder blades instead of one. As the boat heels, the windward blade lifts clear while the leeward one stands deep and holds her course without a fight. The price is draft: the standard keel closes off a share of anchorages, and the shallower options only partly reopen them.
This is small-series premium construction. Vacuum-built sandwich with Airex foam core, structural bulkheads laminated to hull and deck rather than bedded in sealant. The hull count runs to dozens, not hundreds. Hence the price, and hence the character of the used market: supply is scarce, specifications vary wildly, and a carbon rig or a teak deck moves the value of a given hull by tens of thousands.
Living with her: test voices and the rare owner
Everyone who has sailed her agrees on what happens at the wheel. The steering is this boat’s central argument.
“Off the wind on a deep reach with the big headsail, the boat tracked along well at 8 knots, and the speedo leapt accordingly to a solid 10 knots as we headed up a few degrees and brought the breeze abeam. We then swapped the code zero for the self-tacking jib and made an easy and respectable 7.6 knots closehauled. The wheels were as light and responsive as can be, and those two rudders offered complete control.”
“In 12 to 15 knots of true wind she is very much at ease on every point of sail; her speed and ease of handling won us over, as did the deck ergonomics.”
The interior comes one way: three cabins, two heads, owner’s cabin forward. Light oak as standard, teak as an option. Tests note how quiet she is underway and how much stowage the joinery hides. But a low profile has a cost, and it is named honestly by the Portuguese analyst Paulo of Interesting Sailboats, the only independent voice to have examined this boat systematically:
“The ones taller than me [1.88 m] may find the interior height a bit on the short side but on Solaris they have chosen to maintain a low windage and a low profile...and there are no miracles. For once they thought first about sailing... a sailboat’s [interior], not really an apartment like.”
The ocean is possible for her, but it is not her main genre. The dealer network reports Atlantic crossings and ARC entries among owners; a firsthand account of heavy weather aboard a 44 specifically has never surfaced in public. That gap is one we leave honestly open.
The case of the extra ton and a half
The one public argument around the Solaris 44 is not about a failure. It is about a figure on the yard’s website.
At her premiere the boat was listed with a light displacement of 9,900 kg. Later the yard quietly corrected the specification to 10,500. Then came the measurements: racing hulls that passed through the hands of ORC measurers returned different numbers altogether.
“...which was initially given with a 9900kg displacement, and then corrected to 10500kg. But even so, the Farewell IV... displaces, according to its ORC file, 11433kg without sails or tankage and 12778kg in sailing condition.”
Confirmation from primary data: the 2024 ORC International certificate of a second boat, CHISPA, records 12,405 kg. Two independent measurements, both far above the brochure.
What this means for a buyer is less than it seems and more than the yard would like. Less, because measured hulls carry racing kit and owner additions, and extra weight over a 3,600 kg bulb does not make the boat tender; the measurements confirm her as the stiffest, most powerful boat of her group when the wind is up. More, because brochure polars and expectations of a “light” boat need recalibrating, and because the number on the website and the number on the crane are not the same number. When buying a specific hull, ask for a weighing at haul-out or a current ORC file.
Buying a used Solaris 44: problems and what to check
From here on, this dossier switches to survey mode.
First, establish which “Solaris 44” this is
At least four boats carry the name: ours (Soto Acebal, premiered 2018), the Solaris One 44 of 2011, the Doug Peterson Solaris 44 of 2004, and an entirely new Solaris 44 launched in late 2026. Databases confuse them. Sailboatdata files the old One 44 under the heading “Solaris 44”, which is how a draft of 1.90 m that our boat never had keeps leaking into listings. Verify designer, year and dimensions, not the name.
Weight and keel
Ask for a weighing or an ORC file; in the ORC database the boat appears under the classes “Solaris 44”, “44.2”, “442” and “442 SD”, all the same design, and “SD” does not mean sail drive. The keel programme itself is standard for a T-keel with a bulb: the hull joint, the keel bolts, any grounding history. No marque-specific weakness is documented here.
Twin rudders and their linkage
The steering is cable-driven to two quadrants. Check tension and play at both, the blade bearings, and any signs of ventilation or impact. On a test boat of the closely comparable Grand Soleil 44, the German magazine Yacht caught over-tensioned steering cables and a wooden-feeling helm. Nothing of the kind is documented on a Solaris 44, but the system is common to the class and an hour of a surveyor’s time here is well spent.
The rig
Aluminium is standard and carbon a frequent option, down to carbon rudder stocks. Carbon means its own laminate and rigging inspection. And one lesson from the biography of the series: the only known major casualty is the yacht Baltazar, which lost her mast at the end of the 2019 Caribbean 600, a few miles from the finish. From photographs the likely cause was a clevis pin that had worked free, not the structure. The moral for a survey is banal and therefore mandatory: every clevis, every pin.
Teak deck and recessed hardware
Teak is an expensive option with an expensive old age: remaining thickness, bedding, leaks. The recessed tracks, clutches and traveller live in wells; check their drains and look for water tracks in the deckhead below. One Italian listing for a 2019 hull gives the scale of the theme in a single line: side decks relaid in 2025.
Specification against price
The spread of equipment across the series is enormous: carbon rig, teak, generator, air conditioning, watermaker, electric winches. Two hulls of the same year can honestly differ by a hundred thousand euros. Audit the inventory list, not the year.
Engine
Standard is 30 hp with a saildrive, with 60 and 75 hp options. The 30 hp unit is modest for a boat of this real weight; at survey that is a matter of expectations, not defects. The saildrive itself follows the usual regime of diaphragm, seals and anode.
Solaris 44 price and market: scarce goods on a live counter
The market for the Solaris 44 is small but, unlike some boats in this catalogue, it exists. As this dossier went to press, about nine boats were listed worldwide, seven of them used, concentrated in Italy, France and Greece. The series counts “over thirty” hulls by dealer accounts, with build numbers reaching 45; that discrepancy stays open.
Price anchors. A new boat started at €318,900 ex VAT in 2019 and reached €399,900 by 2024, but that is a bare base; real delivered specifications ran to €460,000-650,000 ex VAT. The used market remembers it: a 2019 hull with carbon rig, teak and fresh lithium batteries stood at a Rome brokerage for €549,000, essentially the price of a new boat in her year. The residual value of premium Italians works for the seller.
The practical conclusion: there is almost no choice within the model, negotiation turns on the specification of the individual hull, and the buyer’s main work is not finding a boat but auditing her inventory and her weight. Good hulls with honest specifications move through the marque brokers (Berthon, Mediaship, Mondialbroker), often before wide publicity.
Market snapshot: August 2026. This section is updated with each revision.
Solaris 44 vs Grand Soleil 44, X-Yachts, Arcona and Pogo
Grand Soleil 44 (Matteo Polli) is the principal rival and the great fork of the Italian choice. Base prices at launch nearly matched; from there it becomes philosophy.
“The GS 44 will be faster and more fun to sail in light and medium winds, and in what regards racing and overall performance, will be always faster than the Solaris 44, unless in very specific and limited offshore situations.”
The other side of the same analysis: when the wind is up and the course is to weather, the heavier, stiffer Solaris with her deep ballast takes over, and on a seaway under autopilot she is the calmer boat.
X-Yachts X4.6 and XP 44 are the northern answer: the XP 44 carries the best ballast ratio of the group, the X4.6 a bigger hull and a bigger price. Danish school against Italian is largely an argument about taste; we wrote about the character of that school at length in the Xc 45 dossier.
Arcona 435 is Swedish handwork, sitting between the GS 44 and the Solaris on pace and above both in real cost, since the yard famously does not discount.
Pogo 44 is another religion entirely: roughly half the paper weight, a swing keel, an interior without doors. Faster on trade-wind courses, harder work to windward.
The formula as the comparisons settle it: maximum racing sparkle in middle airs, Grand Soleil; northern construction and ballast, X-Yachts; hand-built joinery, Arcona; trade winds and autopilot miles, Pogo; looks, helm feel and stiffness in a blow, Solaris.
Open questions
The real production count and the logic of the build numbers (thirty-plus built against hull No. 45) do not reconcile from open sources. The launch-year base price of 2018 appears in dealer texts as €298,000 but has no primary confirmation. Fuel capacity is 220 litres by the factory against 370 by one dealer, unresolved. Above all, this boat still has no extended firsthand heavy-weather account beyond the dry chronicle of Baltazar’s dismasting. Owner interviews are underway; their testimony will join the next revision.
Solaris 44 specifications (2018–)
| Length overall | 13.35 m |
| Waterline length | 12.71 m |
| Beam | 4.18 m |
| Draft (standard / options) | 2.60 / 2.40 / 2.20 m |
| Displacement (declared) | 9,900 → 10,500 kg (ORC measurements: 11,400-12,400 kg) |
| Ballast | 3,600 kg, lead bulb |
| Sail area (upwind) | 119 m² (main 66 + genoa 53) |
| Engine | 30 hp standard; 60 / 75 hp options, saildrive |
| Water / fuel | 380 / 220 L |
| Construction | Airex-cored sandwich, vacuum built, laminated bulkheads |
| CE category | A (Open Sea), RINA |
| Built | 30+ hulls (build numbers to 45; range open) |
FAQ
How much does a used Solaris 44 cost?
Expect roughly €450,000-600,000 depending on specification; a 2019 hull with carbon rig and teak was listed at €549,000. Supply is scarce, with fewer than ten boats typically listed worldwide at any moment.
What are the known problems of the Solaris 44?
No defects of the series are publicly documented, which is both rare and a limitation: the series is small and the owners are not forum people. What deserves checking are the class-wide items: the cable steering of the twin rudders, the teak deck and recessed hardware, the saildrive, and the real weight of the hull against the brochure.
What are the Solaris 44-2 and 442 SD?
ORC measurement-file designations for the same 2018 design, not separate series. "SD" does not stand for sail drive.
Solaris 44 or Grand Soleil 44?
The Grand Soleil is faster in light and medium winds and on the racecourse; the Solaris is stiffer and more powerful in a breeze, calmer on a seaway, and built in a smaller series to a different standard of finish. Launch prices were nearly identical.
Is the Solaris 44 suitable for ocean sailing?
She is CE Category A, and owners have crossed the Atlantic and entered the ARC. By conception, though, she is a fast Mediterranean cruiser: deep draft, moderate tankage, and no firsthand heavy-weather account of a 44 has yet been published.
Method: this dossier was assembled from tests by Cruising World, Bateaux.com, YACHT.de, Solovela and Giornale della Vela, the design analyses of Interesting Sailboats, yard reporting by no-frills-sailing.com, primary ORC certificates (Farewell IV, CHISPA), factory and dealer specifications (Solaris, Berthon, boot Düsseldorf) and brokerage archives 2019-2026. Quotes are given in the original English or translated from French and Italian with meaning preserved. The defining feature of the source base is that owner experience of this model is barely public: independent analysis rests on one author and two ORC measurements. Contradictions that data could not resolve are left open and named. Owner interviews are in progress; their testimony will join the next revision.