Valiant sailboats: a performance-cruiser concept built first in Washington, then in Texas
Nathan Rothman and George Hazzard founded Valiant Yachts in 1973. Rothman, working out of Seattle, had decided in the early 1970s that the ocean-sailing community needed a new kind of offshore boat, and he brought his idea to a young naval architect, Robert Perry. Perry set out to build a cruising sailboat with traditional lines that a couple could handle easily, yet with the offshore performance usually associated with racing boats — a formula that, once the resulting Valiant 40 proved itself, gave rise to a category Rothman and Perry called Performance Cruising Yachts. To build that first design, Valiant contracted Uniflite, a powerboat manufacturer in Bellingham, Washington, and the Valiant 40 — recognizable by its trademark canoe stern — began rolling out of Uniflite's factory door.
Origins and ownership
Uniflite built 159 Valiant 40s between 1975 and 1984. Rich Worstell, a Lake Texoma marina owner who had added the Valiant line to his own business as a dealer, bought the company in 1984 when Uniflite put it up for sale. By his own account, Worstell's team had no boatbuilding background at the time: "Prior to buying Valiant, we hadn't built any boats," he said. "We were just sailors." In 1985 he moved the entire operation to Cedar Mills Marina on Lake Texoma to build the boats himself, and the first Texas-built Valiant 40 was hull number 267. Worstell later sold Valiant Yachts to Rob Ezzell and Mike Burns. In a letter dated January 22, 2011, the company announced it would no longer produce new Valiant sailboats, citing "the ongoing economic situation." Many of its craftsmen, technicians, and administrators were retained and reassigned to its sister company, Cedar Mills Marina, and by that point the Worstell family and Valiant staff had been building boats in Texas for more than 25 years.
The designers
Robert Perry drew nearly every hull in the Valiant line across three decades. Beyond the original 40, he designed the Valiant 47 in 1981 — also built by Uniflite, until 1983 — and the Esprit 37, created for a builder whose Valiant 40 had already made his reputation. After Worstell took over in Texas, the collaboration continued: Perry helped update the Valiant 47 into the Valiant 50, and the Valiant 42 that Worstell introduced was, by Practical Sailor's account, a direct descendant of Perry's original 40.
Construction through the eras
The Valiant 40's Uniflite-built years carried a well-documented resin problem: between hull numbers 120 and 249, Uniflite changed its resin mixtures to include a fire-retardant additive that Cruising World found highly correlated with blistering on boats produced from 1976 to 1981, while hulls 250 to 266 used a non-fire-retardant resin instead. The parallel Esprit 37 line went through its own version of the same story — boats built by Nordic Yachts from 1977 to 1980 have stayed relatively blister-free, some built by Uniflite between 1980 and 1982 blistered above and below the waterline, and later boats moved to an isophthalic resin immune to the problem. That isophthalic resin became the standard once Worstell's Texas yard was building boats: the Valiant 39 uses it from gelcoat through laminate, and the Valiant 50's one-piece, solid-fiberglass hull, nearly two inches thick at the turn of the bilge, is built the same way. In 2008, the company's national sales manager, Rick Lemon, told Texoma Living that the hull design hadn't changed since Hull No. 1, and that neither the rigging nor the keel had either — even as the company said it had made more than 400 smaller improvements and modifications over the years.
Lines and generations
The Valiant 40 remained the line's anchor throughout its Washington and Texas eras; hull number 122, named Mooneshine, became the first American monohull to finish the 1976 OSTAR under Francis Stokes. Perry's Esprit 37, marketed in Valiant's own brochures as designed to "fill the gap between the racing yacht and the performance cruiser," later became the basis for the Valiant 39, which Cruising World called essentially an updated edition of the 37; circumnavigator Mark Schrader described the 39 as "a bombproof boat built to take someone out to sea and bring him back intact." The Valiant 47, built from 1981, earned a reputation as a world-renowned cruiser for its comfort and safety — Valiant 47s completed two of the first three solo, non-stop circumnavigations of the globe, one of them by Bill Pinckney, the first African-American to sail around the world. Worstell's Texas-era additions rounded out the range: the Valiant 42, a direct descendant of the original 40 whose deck was molded without any hatch bosses and left largely free of teak trim; the Valiant 50, a largely custom, hand-built boat that takes about eight months to complete and of which roughly 40 have been delivered since 1994; and, at the smaller end, the Valiant 32, a scaled-down version of the 40 of which about 67 were built in the late 1970s and early 1980s before production shifted to Texas.
Who Valiant is for
Valiant's core audience is bluewater sailors drawn to Perry's double-ended, canoe-stern hull form and the marque's circumnavigation record more than to any single model year. Because the line's early production spans a documented resin transition, buyers considering a Uniflite-built boat are choosing a specific hull-number era as much as a model; those looking at Worstell's Texas-built 39, 42, 47, or 50 are buying into a smaller, close-built yard that carried Perry's original design brief forward long after the company left Washington.
