Formosa/Peterson 46 – designed by Doug Peterson
Center cockpit wheel area.
Fore and aft cabin – two heads
With Bow Thruster and 5 kv diesel generator.

Doug Peterson is one of the US' most famous yacht designers of the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's.  As far as we know, his one major cruising design was the Peterson 44'. Peterson was looking to combine the solid construction and comfortable interior lay out of the boats then plying most of the world's cruising routes with some of the go-fast lines of the newer racing boats. With a view to making the boat affordable to a fairly large segment of the would-be-world-cruising community, the boats were built in Taiwan to reduce costs.

The design, end product, and pricing appear to have been very competitive and about 600 Peterson 44s were sold. The design was so successful it appears the Taiwan builder, Formosa Boat Building (though boats were also build at the Queen Long yard as well we understand), reasoned that the boats would sell themselves without Peterson's name attached. To achieve this, we understand that Formosa simply added one foot to the 44" design (apparently in the cockpit area where the 44's are a bit short on space - our observations support this) and marketed it as a Peterson 46 even though it was officially called a Formosa 46.