Tested: Delta Powerboats 48 Coupe
Love and Life in Stockholm
Last year, Delta Powerboats Founder Kalle Wessel was nearly killed in a horrific crash. Today, he’s found a new lease on life and reveals a seriously seaworthy new coupe.
Kalle Wessel has never seemed to me like the kind of man who could die. He is 6-foot, 5-inches tall, with shoulder-length silvering hair and hands that dwarf a can of beer. And he has the capable and gruff demeanor of the lineage of Norwegian sea captains from whence he came. That’s why it was such a shock to me last summer when I picked up my phone to hear the news that he was in a coma.
The founder of Sweden’s Delta Powerboats was piloting a speedboat at 110 knots in Stockholm Harbor when something—no one knows what—went very wrong. The boat flipped, tossing two passengers and crashing down on Wessel and his co-pilot, who was paralyzed. Wessel himself spent the next seven weeks in a coma, and four more months after that in the hospital. “I am lucky to be alive,” he told me over a seafood lunch at a fish shack on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. “I am lucky to be here, doing this.”
By “this” he meant cruising around the archipelago, showcasing his newest wares—in this case the Delta 48 Coupe that will be debuting in North America this fall. This coupe is a bit of a coup. She’s an express cruiser in a packed field of boats in this range, but I do believe she has what it takes to standout.
First and foremost, she is made of carbon fiber. I don’t know of any other boats of this type built using that material. I’ve had issues with carbon boats before, and have written about them in these pages. They can be a little squirrelly, and sometimes feel like they lack the requisite ballast I look for in a boat. Not so with this builder. This is the fifth Delta I’ve tested in my career and all of them have handled safely and securely. I have to chalk this up in large part to Swedish sensibility. The 48 Coupe is fast for sure—the top end I saw wheeling her in Sweden was 41.8 knots—but the builder isn’t sacrificing seaworthiness for eye-popping numbers at wide open throttle.
Where the carbon really shines through is in this boat’s efficiency numbers. At a cruise of 30.5 knots, she was burning just .92 gallons per nm with twin 440-horsepower Volvo Penta D6s. A large part of those laudable numbers is due to her feathery displacement—just 17,636 pounds dry.
The knock on carbon fiber used to be that it was brittle, though those criticisms seem to have been quelled in recent years. These days, the thing people will tell you they don’t like is that carbon-fiber boats are loud—that you can’t sleep in the staterooms because the water sloshing against the hull is deafening. Thus, I, your intrepid correspondent, was forced to test out these qualms. After a heavy meal of burrata and Swedish meatballs at the main restaurant on the legendary island of Sandhamn, and spurred on by jet lag, I retired to the forward master and took a quick snooze. And I’ll say, despite sound-dampening laminates and egg-crating, it is probably a teence louder down below than on a similar fiberglass build. But the noise certainly isn’t overwhelming, and I did get some sleep. What’s more, the complaints of a boat being too loud to sleep on seem so subjective to me as to be moot.
The 48 Coupe’s styling is immaculate. When I boarded the boat at the Delta headquarters in downtown Stockholm, it was moored stern-to, so I didn’t really get a good look at it. But after we pulled into lunch at the aforementioned fish shack, I got a glimpse of the boat in all its glory. The design was given a fresh jolt by Ted Mannerfelt, who has also worked with Delta on a 26 and 33. The lines are masculine and clean. An axe bow provides a burly look that might have skewed clunky with Delta’s traditional inverted-rake windshield. Instead, the 48 has a steeply raked-back windshield that makes the boat look like a big cat hunkered down and waiting to pounce. A sheer with a slight camber and highlighted by a burly rubrail only adds to the effect. In the car world, a salesman will say “this car has eyes” about a vehicle they know is going to jump off the lot thanks to its looks. And when I saw the Delta’s profile, that’s exactly what I thought. This boat has eyes.
Her interior isn’t too shabby either. Delta uses so much Dedar fabric with an easily recognizable diamond-pattern basquette weave on its upholstery that the look has become nearly synonymous with the 20-year-old brand. The fabric on my test boat was gray and white, though there is a tangerine option that seems to have split the crowd right down the middle. I, for one, like that pop of collar, particularly for a boat that would be right at home making runs from South Florida to the Bahamas.
The fit and finish in the salon was of good quality as well. The wheel was covered in a sumptuous dark-mocha Alcantara, as was the dash. The woodwork was also a strong point with super-cozy joinery seen on the teak and oak. Interestingly, Delta builds its boats not in Sweden but on a small Estonian island called Saaremaa. With a population of 31,000, Delta provides employment for both husbands and wives in the same family. Thus, much of the wood you see on board is carpentered by the husband and finished by the wife. That could easily explain why the joinery is such a perfect union.
The overall design philosophy of the 48’s interior is exceptionally Swedish. The windows are large, the furniture is no-muss, and everything is clean, clean, clean. They didn’t even put a television on my test boat—though of course one will be fitted on before the boat comes to America.
Down below, the 48 Coupe has a three-stateroom, two-head layout that makes her a good choice for families. That forward master offers plenty of light thanks to expansive, rectangular hullside windows, as well as deep stowage units to starboard. Identical guest staterooms mirror each other at amidships and had comfortable queen-size berths with no walk-around space. I think these quarters would serve well for a long weekend with up to six people on board. Longer than three nights might be a bit much for some I suspect—but three nights on the nose?—that’s just about right.
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The 48 Coupe that is coming to America this fall will be the first with outboards. Delta expects to put twin 600-horsepower Mercury V12s on the transom—there may be a tri-power option too, though as of presstime that remains undecided. Triples may not be necessary though. With the twins, this boat should be plenty fast, to the tune of an expected 51-knot clip with the hammer down. With outboards, the space in the belly of the yacht where the Volvo Pentas used to live becomes wide open. Delta plans to nestle a small Williams RIB in that spot, greatly augmenting this boat’s Bahamas bona fides.
She also excelled in Scandinavia. Though I was in Stockholm days shy of the summer solstice when daylight extends to 11 p.m. and night never really comes, the weather was nasty—cold and rainy. The saying goes that summer in Stockholm is the nicest day of the year, and this was not it. But hunkered inside the boat with long sleeves and raincoats on, we were quite comfortable, and I was struck by the rugged beauty of this part of the world—the round gray boulders lush with moss and endless green forest running along the coast, pushed fast against the inky, brackish waters of the Baltic. It was the kind of scene that makes a man on a boat feel like a Viking. Having a guy like Wessel aboard certainly did nothing to dim that sensation. He seemed uncharacteristically tense during our trip though. With his jaw set firm and his concentration seemingly somewhere else than on what was going on on board the 48. At lunch he opened up a bit about his accident, and I wondered if perhaps there were some lingering effects. Was this the same man I had met so many years ago, testing a Delta 88 on the west coast of Sweden in 2015? Something seemed off. And my suspicions were heightened when he cut what I thought would be a full day on the water short. He did however mention that that day, June 17th, was the one-year anniversary of his boat crash. Maybe that’s it, I thought.
The following day—the final one of the trip—I arrived at the boat early and waited for the rest of our crew. Wessel showed up a bit late, and noticeably lighter of step. In fact, he was beaming. It turns out after he dropped me off the day before, he had picked up his girlfriend Mea, whom he had met just before his accident. She had stuck by his side through the entirety of the ordeal, providing the kind of rock-solid support a human in those conditions needs and deserves. They drove out to the very spot where Wessel had wrecked. He proposed, and she said yes.
It was storybook ending in a storybook city. And with the 48 Coupe coming soon to America, Wessel and Delta are ready to write their next chapter.
Delta Powerboats 48 Coupe Test Report
Delta Powerboats 48 Coupe Specifications:
LOA: 46’4”
Beam: 13’1”
Draft: 3’4”
Fuel: 528 gal.
Water: 105 gal.
Power: 2/440-hp Volvo Penta D6s; 2/600-hp Mercury V12s
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This article originally appeared in the October 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/boats/delta-powerboats-48-coupe-sea-trial-and-review
