Flying Tiger sailboats: an affordable one-design sportboat, designed in public
Flying Tiger began as one California boatbuilder's attempt to sell an affordable sportboat into China's growing sailing scene, and it became something else along the way: a design refined in real time by an online community rather than behind a naval architect's closed door. Bill Stevens, the builder who conceived the project, had already spent a career building and selling yachts under his own name before Robert Perry confirmed, in 2005, that the two of them were putting together something new — this one built in China. What followed was a boat whose drawings, pricing, and even its crowd of early buyers all took shape in public, on the Sailing Anarchy forum, before the first hull ever left the mold.
Origins and ownership
Stevens arrived at Flying Tiger already a veteran of the charter-yacht business, and the project marked his return to boatbuilding after stepping away from it. Looking to reach the growing numbers of sailors in China with a new, affordable sportboat, he floated the idea on the online community and was inundated with interest before any boat existed — enough that he collected advance deposits from the first fifty buyers at an introductory price, sight unseen. The company that ultimately sold the finished boats was Hiptrader, Stevens' own Coronado outfit, with his son Brian supervising day-to-day production at the Chinese yard.
The designers
Stevens brought the brief to Robert Perry: a sportboat that would fit inside a 40-foot shipping container and stay within reach on price. Perry drew it, and Stevens then posted the drawing on the Sailing Anarchy forum and asked the community for comments — the moment that set Flying Tiger apart from an ordinary production launch. That connection ran deeper than marketing copy: Sailing Anarchy founder Scot Tempesta later sailed a Flying Tiger 10-Meter to the class win and was declared overall winner at the 2007 Sperry Top-Sider NOOD in San Diego, and Perry himself credited the site's community with helping refine the smaller 7.5M just as it had the original 10-Meter. That second boat drew on a wider design team: Ivan Erdevicki engineered it from his office in Montenegro, Bob Pattison at Neil Pryde Sails in Connecticut helped develop the rig, and the carbon spars were built with Clive at CST Spars in Sydney, drawing on his experience with Australian 18-foot skiffs.
Construction through the eras
The 10-Meter's hull came out of a retractable keel and a cassette rudder built into a "medium tech" foam-cored layup finished in vinylester resin — cored fiberglass throughout except for a single-skin cabin top, with a structural spine where the core was removed and the laminate brought down to a single, thinner skin. Sailing World's 2007 test attributed the boat's early rough edges to a straightforward cause: building at a factory halfway around the world, with labor that was initially unskilled, produced the kind of missteps that show up on a first production run. The 7.5M that followed in 2009 came from the same Han Sheng yard in Xiamen that had built the 10-Meter before it, carrying that construction base forward into the smaller design.
Lines and generations
The 10-Meter, at just under 33 feet, was the line that defined the brand: roughly 100 boats left the yard in about two years, and the design found particular popularity in Australia. The 7.5, at roughly 25 feet, arrived in 2009 as a more compact second entry from the same builder and yard, aimed at extending the same affordable, community-shaped formula to a smaller boat.
Who Flying Tiger is for
Flying Tiger suits sailors after an affordable one-design sportboat with a genuinely unusual pedigree — a boat whose lines were posted for public comment before it was built, and whose most public early race result was won by the founder of the community that helped shape it. That same low-cost, overseas production run is the trade-off: Sailing World's early test found real construction shortcomings on the first boats built, the kind of thing a buyer weighing this brand should go in expecting rather than discovering.