Michael Peters grew up in Los Angeles as the son of a professor at the University of Southern California. His dad ran a summer camp on Catalina Island, 26 miles off the coast of Long Beach. The youngster longed for summers there. When Michael was 14, he took over the responsibility of keeping the camp’s ragtag fleet of donated boats operational. He learned how to patch holes in fiberglass and wood hulls, and he immersed himself in understanding how they worked. Today, his boats have won countless championships in offshore powerboat racing, and as many design and innovation awards. Soundings caught up with him after his company moved into a new office in Sarasota, Florida.
What prompted your company’s move? A developer bought our building and is planning to tear it down. We have 10 employees, mostly naval architects, mechanical engineers and a couple of designers. Our new office has two stories. The upper floor is all work we do for the U.S. Navy. The door has a code to enter, and I don’t even have the code.
What is your background? I’m not a naval architect, but I think I would get grandfathered in. I’ll use the term to describe what I do, but I’m careful not to say that around my office, which is full of them.
How did you learn your craft? I started off at the LA County Public Library, checking out every naval architecture book I could get my hands on. Also, down in San Pedro, there were lots of boatyards. I used to go down there to look at boats from the bottom up. I had a fascination with hull shapes and drive systems. Curiosity drove my education.
Did you spend much time on the water? After high school, I took a year off to be the caretaker at a summer camp. I lived there by myself, and I had a little 15-foot skiff with a 50-hp outboard that I used to cross the Catalina Channel in the middle of winter. I used to wear a wetsuit under my clothes. That’s where my fascination with running a planing boat in rough water was founded.
Where did you go to college? I enrolled at USC in mechanical engineering, but I didn’t like it, so I transferred to architecture. I did two years, and at the end of my third, I developed a stepped hull design that I later patented. So I went to my father, who was the dean of the university, and I told him I wanted to drop out of school. At 21, I wrote all my arguments for the patent office, which took three years. I had to bone up on naval architecture theory and predict what I was going to do. It became a huge part of my education.
Were you successful with the patent? My first real job was in New Orleans with Harold Halter at Halter Marine. I got him to take an option on the design and to pay all my patent bills. Halter had bought Cigarette Racing Team, and he built some prototypes based on my design. The person they brought in to evaluate the prototype was Don Aronow of Cigarette Racing Team.
How did that go? I grew up reading about offshore racing, and was excited to meet Don. He showed up to drive my prototype wearing a Speedo. He ran it on Lake Pontchartrain for five minutes. Then he said to me, “Nice boat kid, but don’t waste your time with this.” I went from hero worship to hatred in a matter of seconds.
Did you ever work with Aronow again? I did work for him the last nine years of his life. He said, “Mike, I worked with guys like Jim Wynne, Walt Walters and Harry Schoell, and I get along with you better than any of them.” Don was one of those guys who, as much as he could be a hard character, he liked the underdog. He was in my corner supporting me until the day he died. After my divorce, he asked me to go down to Miami to run his company, USA Racing Team, in 1987. I was there for a day, when he walked out of my office and then was shot dead.
Who played a role in your development as a designer? I was influenced by C. Raymond Hunt and Sonny Levi more than anybody.
What was your first big break in boat design? Mike Drury was good friends with Halter, and lived in a houseboat at the Halter dock. We became friends, and he asked me to design and build a catamaran for him. He got me to leave Halter and move to Sarasota to open my own shop. The wooden boat was 35 feet long, and it was branded as a Maelstrom. It had triple outboards, and within about two years, we set a world record of 131 mph.
How did you end up designing raceboats for Italian teams? I built a couple more wood boats, including one for Apache, and then I stopped building boats. I switched to designing only. In 1987, I got a telegram from this group in Italy called CUV that heard I was doing catamarans. I flew to Italy and designed 37- and a 41-foot aluminum cats. CUV is an acronym for Cantiere Uniti Viareggio. The owners were Italian communists, and they were a super group of people. After a year or two, we started winning and being competitive with the Cougars, aluminum hulls built in the United Kingdom. Then Norberto Ferretti of the Ferretti Group asked me to design a composite catamaran. The company was called Tencara, and the first boat was Iceberg. It was 39 feet and built with pre-impregnated carbon fiber and Nomex honeycomb in an autoclave. The autoclave wasn’t wide enough for the boat, so it was built in two halves. When the boat first ran, it didn’t make speed, so I flew over to Italy and we got it from 105 mph up to about 130.The boat outran everyone in Class 1, which was more than 30 boats at the time. Iceberg was successful, but in the last race of the second season, it hit a wave and disintegrated.
What made your racing designs game changers? I had a radical approach. I was doing wider, lower tunnels. I had people sitting in the middle and the fuel up in the middle rather than in the sponsons. I realized that if we wanted to win races, we had to slow the boats down to get consistency out of them. I learned to make a boat that could make it through the whole course and handle myriad conditions.
When did you decide to get out of racing? I won 20 world championships in 30 years and felt it was a good time to stop, but the transition wasn’t instant. I spent about 10 years trying to get away from racing. I would meet people for a project and they would say, “Aren’t you the raceboat designer?” And I would say, “No, we can do other things.”
Who was one of your early non-racing backers? I had the patented stepped V-bottom hull, and someone told me Intrepid Powerboats founder John Michel was looking for a new design. I brought him a model of the hull and he said, “OK, let’s build it.” We built a 37 with inboards, and that was the beginning of stepped hulls with Intrepid. We eventually modified the design and made it much more conventional. We designed a half dozen different hulls for Intrepid.
What other recreational boat manufacturers have you’ve worked with? We had a good run with Contender. We started with Chris-Craft in 1999, and they still build some of our designs. We had years where much of what we were doing was with Invincible Boats, and then the same with Viking/Valhalla. We have a new program we’re starting with Hinckley. We’ve been with Groupe Beneteau almost 25 years now, doing many of their planing hulls. We’re working with Wellcraft and have ongoing stuff with Princess. I like to have projects that represent every sector: the cruising market, fishing, yacht tenders, RIBs. The biggest thing we have is the U.S. Navy’s Mark 2 combatant craft. That will be the Navy’s design until 2050.
What trends are you seeing that have the potential to change the way boats are drawn and built? With larger boats in the 60-foot-plus range, there are two common themes: the floating villa and the beach. In some cases those two themes are combined. Understanding how people currently use boats is important because if you keep designing them the old way, people won’t buy them. We’re doing one that’s 85 feet, and it’s specifically designed to be a day boat.
What boat-design trends made you shake your head? One thing I fought for several years was a vertical bow on a fast boat. In the 1920s, all the fast boats had that. The vertical bow went away because a deep forefoot on a high-speed boat could trigger spinouts. Beneteau felt they were missing the market trends, and about five years ago, they had us do the vertical bow. We figured out a way to make it so it doesn’t spin out. The other thing is these huge hullside windows. You look at them and ask, “When is someone going to approach a dock and punch the whole thing in?” In the 1960s or 1970s, there was a hideous boat called the Cargile Cutter. When you looked, it was as tall as it was long, and it had these huge windows on the side and a little flybridge on top. You look at the 80- and 90-foot yachts today, and some look like they started life as Cargile Cutters.
Which high-tech building techniques do you find exciting? With the computer-generated software that’s being used to design and mill the boats, the accuracy and complexity you can build in is amazing. The other thing is being able to 3D-print limited numbers of stainless-steel and titanium parts. In the past, you couldn’t afford to do that because there wasn’t enough production to back it up.
Can you speak to electric and hybrid propulsion systems? About 15 years ago, I was asked to speak at a design symposium in New Zealand. My background with high-speed racing and green technology don’t mesh at all. I came to the conclusion that there’s nothing green about building a boat, no matter how you slice it. You can build a wooden sailboat, but no matter what you do, you’re using more natural resources than other people would use in a lifetime. The biggest problem with electrical propulsion is the weight of the batteries.
What is the most challenging aspect of your job? The answer is twofold. The first is if a boat doesn’t have a problem to solve. If you’re doing a big center console, how do you make it different from what everybody else has? Second is when a client comes to you with something unique. You need to understand the problem. What kind of propulsion should it have? What kind of material should it be built from? The secret to our success is listening to the client and not giving them a Michael Peters boat. When we go to Hinckley, we give them a Hinckley.
December 2025
