Our Story
Viper Boating Systems began with two brothers, one unforgettable boat, and a father who taught them that speed, craftsmanship, and time on the water could become part of a family’s identity.
The Beginning
Before Viper Boating Systems was a company, it was a family ritual. In 1972, Steve Roberts brought home a 17-foot Hornet—a low, fast, V-bottom jet boat that would become part machine, part gathering place, and part family legend.
Steve had been an avid car racer at California Speedway during the 1960s. His instinct for speed, tuning, and mechanical performance naturally moved from the track to the water. The Hornet became his next expression of that passion.
Born in 1972
Sean arrived the same year as the Hornet. Family stories remember him teething on the boat’s neoprene steering wheel—an almost perfect symbol for how early the Hornet entered his life.
As he grew, the boat became a classroom in mechanics, performance, water conditions, and family responsibility. Sean eventually learned to ski behind it, first on the yellow beginner trainer and later on a single ski. His favorite was a Maharajah ski.
Born in 1979
Scott grew up with the same boat, the same Bass Lake summers, and the same expectation that a day on the water also meant understanding the equipment that made it possible.
He followed the same path from the yellow trainer to a single ski, then moved into wakeboards and other boat styles. The forms changed, but the love of boating passed down from their father remained.
Bass Lake
Every year, the Roberts family returned to Bass Lake. They camped at Wishon Cove, anchored the Hornet nearby, and built their summers around the rhythm of the lake. Bass Lake felt magical because it joined place, family, movement, and memory.
There were trips across the lake to the Pines, outings to Bass Lake Falls, long days skiing, and countless passages from one end of the lake to the other. The Hornet was not reserved for special occasions. It was used, worked on, raced, maintained, and woven into the family’s everyday life.
Performance Heritage
The offseason was for working on the boat. Steve and his sons maintained, tuned, and learned from the Hornet’s Oldsmobile 455, which the family remembers as producing about 475 horsepower.
On the water, the Hornet’s defining advantage was not only straight-line speed. When racing flat-bottom boats, the V-shaped hull came alive in the turns. Where flat bottoms could skip across the surface, the Hornet cut into the water and held its line.
That combination of power, hull behavior, and hands-on maintenance became the technical memory behind VBS: a boat should be beautiful, fast, understandable, and built to perform as a complete system.
Why VBS Exists
Viper Boating Systems is inspired by the life Steve Roberts created around the Hornet and by the love of boating he passed to Sean and Scott. The goal is not simply to reproduce an old boat. It is to preserve what made it meaningful while rebuilding it with modern design, manufacturing, configurability, and service.
Every VBS project begins with the same question: how do we honor the memory of the original experience while making something precise, useful, exciting, and enduring for the next family?