Overview
The Baba 40, later renamed Panda 40 and then Tashiba 40, is the third boat in a lineup that paired developer Bob Berg, designer Robert Perry, and the Taiwanese Ta Shing yard. It reads as a full-keel reinterpretation of Perry’s own Valiant 40, the boat that put “performance” next to “cruiser” a few years earlier, and owners have raced it successfully against modern fin-keel competitors. It also carries some of the more finished interiors seen on a production cruising yacht of its era.
History
The lineage starts with the Baba 30, which brought Berg, Perry, and a then-little-known Taiwanese yard called Shing Sheng together. That yard’s growing success, and the follow-on Baba 35, funded a purpose-built factory and a 1979 name change to Ta Shing. Berg commissioned Perry to design a new 40-footer to round out the line that year. Rather than simply stretch the Baba 35, Perry drew on the Valiant 40’s fin-keel-and-skeg hull form to produce an all-new full-keel design, one he later described as stiffer, better balanced, and considerably faster than the earlier Babas.
The boat launched in 1980. When Berg’s relationship with the Flying Dutchman dealership (which owned the Baba trademark) ended in 1983, the same boat was marketed briefly as the Panda 40, then, from 1984, as the Tashiba 40 once Ta Shing began selling it directly. Production across all three names ran to 1996, totaling 115 boats (hull numbers run to #182, with a gap between #33 and #101). Ta Shing later formed an exclusive relationship with the California-based PAEI; when PAEI shifted to power boats, many of Ta Shing’s molds, including this one, were destroyed.
Design and Construction
The hull is hand-laid GRP, thickening from about 0.41 in at the topsides to 0.57 in at the waterline and 0.90 in at the keel. The deck uses end-grain balsa coring along with high-density closed-cell foam in the deck and cabin trunk. Ballast is cast iron encapsulated in GRP on most boats, though at least one hull is known to have been built with lead. A cutter rig on a bowsprit is standard; a small number, roughly two, were built as ketches, and about eleven were built as a pilothouse variant with two staterooms.
Under Sail
The boat is well regarded for a lively helm and genuine speed for a full-keel cruiser: Michael and Elizabeth Kramer’s Cambria covered 396 nautical miles in 46 hours broad reaching in 35-knot winds down the Sea of Cortez, an average of 8.6 knots. Offshore, the design’s reputation rests on real, independently documented passages. Jeff Hartjoy’s Sailors Run rounded Cape Horn singlehanded in January 2009 on a passage from Callao, Peru toward Buenos Aires, weathering 50-knot winds, a blown staysail, an accidental jibe, and an electrical fire before completing the rounding after 30 days at sea. The same boat rounded the Horn again roughly seven years later, during a solo nonstop circumnavigation attempt.
Buyers Notes
As with most 25-plus-year-old boats, have a surveyor check chainplates and probe the balsa-cored deck for rot. The original mild steel fuel tanks corrode; most boats have had theirs replaced, but confirm this directly rather than assume it on a given hull. Because the same hull was sold under three different names with at least one documented ballast change between the Baba- and Tashiba-branded runs, cross-check a specific boat’s actual ballast and rig against its hull number and build year rather than relying on generic “Baba 40” specifications alone.
