Standing in the center with the steering console, Jörg Schaaf eases the throttle forward and the 9.5m Tender 31 rears up like a stallion on the waters around Potsdam.

From their titled glances, it’s evident that the other boaters have never seen a sleek aluminium hull quite like this one.  Founder of the Dresden-based Schaaf Bootsmanufaktur, Schaaf makes a point of accentuating both the aesthetics and utility of the boats they produce. His eponymous company, although grounded on sturdy German pragmatism, saw its first inkling of an incarnation on the Brazilian isle of Floripa.

For Schaaf, what began almost a decade ago as a winter vacation on the sunny sands of South America developed into an annual six-month retreat from the harsh German winters. “I had a real estate company and had to work the whole summer so I could go away again in the winter,” he remarked, “ and when you’re gone for a week, and you don’t get any more emails, and no one’s calling on the phone, then you start to let it go, and everything’s good. Then you can finally get a clear head.” After a glance at the Tender 31′s modern minimalism, one could say that Schaaf’s clear head was quickly filled with the design and architectural influences of Brazil.

“The drawings, the first attempts at sketches, and how you could organize everything, I had all that in my head there, but the details, the cockpit here, that all came afterwards. May of last year, that was when we really made the design,” stated Schaaf, referring to his team of four in Dresden. Since then, he has gone from concept to manufacturing – with five contracts signed and two boats completed – a remarkable pace for a start-up ship builder.

From the very start, he prefers and encourages customers to bring their own specifications to the drawing board. “They can put it all on the table,” says Schaaf,“ and I’ll try to implement them, so that the client has the feeling that the boat is truly being made just for them”. The entire process typically takes six months during which clientele are invited to visit the shipyard in Dresden, either in-person or through a webcam, to witness their boat taking shape during the final stage of production.

As a sailor, he later came to appreciate the value and appeal of motorboats but lacked the technical background to construct them. “That I had to research. It was just some homework,” he says with a smile, reminiscing at first and then systematically recounting the different aspects of designing and building a boat. Looking over the fine points of the craft in person, one sees their meticulous attention to detail: the wood paneling in the cabin below deck – one of Schaaf’s personal favorites – has been cut to perfectly match the flow of wood grain from the pantry all the way across to the back wall.

Even so, Schaaf hasn’t sacrificed any of the vessel’s function to suit its aesthetics. For a boat of its size, coastal cruising would satisfy the wishes of most customers. However, when Schaaf approached the renowned classification society Germanischer Lloyd, he elected to calibrate the Tender 31 for a Class B ranking instead, which makes it suitable for sporting around on the open sea. “You could take this boat from island to island in the Balearics, if you wanted, and it holds 400 liters of fuel,” he notes. Designed somewhere between Brazil and Germany to create the ideal balance between form and function, long trips seem to be coded in the tender’s DNA. 

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