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An accidental posting on Sailing Anarchy has prompted a remarkable story of both design democracy and sales success for veteran US designer Bob Perry and his Chinese builders

The Flying Tiger 10-Meter
Bill Stevens and I had just spent a week in Xiamen, China working on our 53ft cruising boat project. We had been very impressed with the yard we were using and it was becoming increasingly clear that given the right supervision we could do pretty much anything we wanted there.

Bill had already had some preliminary conversations with the owners about building a club racer for the China market. This boat would be 10m LOA and an able sailer designed in the Œsportboat¹ style, but also easy to sail for anyone just learning to race. It would be marketed in China and designed to fit into a high-cube container to be easily shipped to any part of China for regattas. Until then most one-design regattas in China had been sailed in essentially worn-out J-boats that were, by now, anything but one-design.

Several weeks later Bill called me and said he was going to the Shanghai Boat Show and wanted to take something he could show on this new sportboat...

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Below: With over 75 boats on order we¹d best get all these build details right from the start... the manufacturing team in Xiamen is taking care to get everything absolutely right as the production prototype of the 'Bob Perry-Sailing Anarchy' Flying Tiger 10M comes together