DeFever's design inspired Anerican Marine's Alaskan series in wood. When Tony Fleming, who managed the American Marine yard for a few years, left to start his own boat manufacturing company, he "took" the Alaskan design with him and based his own boat on it, which he still does today. That basic deFever design embodied in such boats as the Alaskan 49, the deFever 46, and the Fleming 55 is to me the best recreational boat design on the planet.
Actually, this is not quite accurate.
Art designed the Alaskan 46 under his own name in the mid-1960s, and he contracted with American Marine to produce it as the "DeFever Alaskan 46". For the first several years, this is the name it was sold under. At the time, American Marine was producing boats for a number of different companies.
In the early 1970s, American Marine decided to expand, and among many different ventures it acquired the Alaskan business from Art, making a number of contractual promises to him. Sadly, due to a number of factors American Marine went bankrupt about 1975. The remains were bought by Grand Banks, who moved to Singapore.
In the meantime, American Marine wanted some larger Alaskans, but since they did not want to pay royalties to Art, they turned to another naval architect, Dair Long, for the Alaskan 49 and 53. Art successfully sued them, but by the time he won American Marine had gone belly up. Art emerged with the name Alaskan and the rights to the boats, which was one of the reasons that the new Grand Banks stopped producing the Alaskan series.
As for Tony Flemming, I was told by Art that Tony build his first Flemming for an owner of a Defever 52, a pilothouse trawler built by Oriental Boat Company (OBC) in Japan. According to Art, this was one of the first boats Tony had designed, and Art claimed that Tony copied the 52 basically down to the inch.
Finally, the owner of the OBC was finding that wages in Japan were to high, and he looked around the area for a better locale. After a bit of work, he settled on Taiwan, and he and Art were pioneers in the entire Taiwan boatbuilding industry. The first boat they built there was the DeFever 49, an updated version of the old Alaskan 46.
As an aside, this is why Art was able to market "Grand Alaskans", and why GB was not able to sell "Alaskans" but had to sell "Aleutians".
Scott Welch
(Amateur Historian of Naval Architecture)