Valiant

Valiant was founded in Seattle in 1973 by Nathan Rothman, who hired an unknown young designer named Robert Perry to draw a cruising boat with a racing underbody — and accidentally created the "performance cruiser" category. The boats were built by Uniflite, a military contractor in Bellingham, Washington, whose fire-retardant resin later gave the marque both its greatest asset and its greatest liability: the strongest offshore résumé of any American production cruiser, and the most famous blister saga in boatbuilding history.

After a sealed class-action settlement helped sink Uniflite in 1984, dealer Rich Worstell bought the molds and moved production to Lake Texoma, Texas — a thousand kilometers from salt water — where Valiant Yachts built semi-custom, blister-immune boats until 2011. The Valiant 40 entered the American Sailboat Hall of Fame in 1997; Perry himself said that if he went voyaging, he'd take a Valiant 40.