Baba sailboats: a Taiwan-built double-ender aimed at outrunning the Westsail 32
The Baba line paired a Seattle yacht broker's business plan with a designer's hull work: Bob Berg wanted a traditional double-ended cruiser that could out-sail and undercut the Westsail 32 and Valiant 32, and Robert Perry gave him a hull worked for speed rather than a copy of either. Built in Taiwan by a yard that grew from a small fishing-boat operation into one of the country's finest builders, the Baba 30, 35, and 40 carried a name that Ta Shing's own workers coined by accident, and a pedigree that traces back through Colin Archer's converted lifeboats to the Tahiti ketches that first proved double-enders could cross oceans.
Origins and ownership
Bob Berg, a Seattle yacht broker, conceived the Baba line in the mid-1970s and formed Flying Dutchman International Ltd. with two business associates to import traditionally styled cruising boats from Taiwan. Berg commissioned a small, then-fledgling fishing-boat yard in Tainan to build Perry's design — Ta Shing, which went on to become one of the world's finest yacht builders. Berg said he chose Taiwan because Ta Shing's boatbuilders were among the best in the world, labor was inexpensive, and the exchange rate was favorable. The Baba Owners Association's own history states that Perry was commissioned to design the line, which sold between 1978 and 1986. The boats' name came from the yard floor: according to author Daniel Spurr's book Heart of Glass, Ta Shing's workers couldn't pronounce Berg's name, and it came out "Baba," which stuck — a story the Baba Owners Association corroborates separately, attributing "Baba" to a local Chinese slang rendering of Bob Berg's name. Flying Dutchman International's import business folded in the mid-1980s, its demise accelerated by a general slump in new-boat sales and a shift in buyer sentiment toward lighter, faster, sleeker designs.
The designers
Perry's brief was to take a relatively heavy, traditional double-ender hull and work the lines to, in his words, ring every tenth of a knot in speed out of the design he could. He gave the Baba 30 an easily driven hull with a prismatic coefficient of .50, which he said would take care of performance in light air, and summarized his approach by saying the result was not a cute cartoon but a really capable offshore cruising yacht. Berg's own framing was commercial rather than technical: his stated objective was a boat faster and less expensive than the Westsail 32 and the Valiant 32. Perry has acknowledged that the Westsail was something of a role model for his early cruising designs regardless, since a cruising boat of that era needed to look something like it to sell. On the build side, Perry credited Berg with taking the time to overcome communication difficulties with the crew at Ta Shing, which he said eliminated construction problems that plagued other Taiwan yards; Perry described Ta Shing as requiring essentially no learning curve, calling the yard great right out of the starting blocks. When Perry drew the larger Baba 35 — having already designed the well-received Tayana 37 — he credited Berg specifically with the new boat's efficient interior layout.
Construction through the eras
Baba 30 production shifted over its run from Volvo engines and spruce spars on early models to Yanmar engines and aluminum spars later on. Seattle-based surveyor and construction consultant Ron Reisner, of Reisner and McEwen, Inc., oversaw construction of Baba yachts during the 1970s across two trips to Taiwan. The Baba 35's interior design likewise evolved over its production run: by 1983, the aluminum mast was shrouded in teak as it entered the saloon, and the head had been relocated from port to starboard. Across the line, Ta Shing's models — per Robert Perry's own production listing — also came in pilot house versions.
Lines and generations
The Baba name did not stay fixed to one badge. The Baba 35 was originally released as the Flying Dutchman 35; that name faded over time and the boat became known as the Baba 35. More consequentially, the underlying designs kept building after the Baba name itself receded: per Perry's own site, Ta Shing built the Baba, Flying Dutchman, and Panda designs, the Tashiba 31 and 36 are refinements of the Baba 30 and 35, and the Tashiba 40 uses the same hull as the earlier 40. The Baba Owners Association describes the same lineage from the ownership side: the design was reworked twice, first as the Panda 34, 38, and 40, and later as the Tashiba 31, 36, and 40. Ta Shing itself carried on well beyond the Baba years, going on to build other well-regarded lines including the Taswell, the Norseman, and the Tashiba.
Who Baba is for
A Baba suits a buyer drawn to a documented double-ender pedigree — Colin Archer's lifeboats and the interwar Tahiti ketches — built by a yard, Ta Shing, whose reputation grew well past this one importer's line. It's a boat bought explicitly as an alternative to the Westsail 32 and Valiant 32: heavier and more traditional-looking than a fin-keel cruiser of the same era, but built and priced by Berg to out-sail and undercut those two specific rivals. Buyers should also understand that "Baba" describes only one chapter of a longer design lineage that continued under the Panda and, later, the Tashiba name — so the story on the transom is narrower than the story of the hull beneath it.
