So begins the story of the Dolphin 24. Nearly 50 years ago Olin Stephens dictated an internal memo to his technical staff – Bill Shaw, DHS (Drake Sparkman), RS, Jr (Rod Stephens) and GGW (Gil Wyland, Sparkman & Stephens' chief engineer.) That memo describes a phone conversation he had with George O'Day. I call this memo the Dolphin 24 Birth Certificate. To see the full text of the memo (click here). I found it as a tissue carbon copy in the back of the Dolphin 24 technical file at S&S’s offices on Fifth Ave in New York.

The mid 1950’s to mid 1960’s was when fiberglass made its often painful way on to the off shore sailboat scene. Entrepreneurs with little cash, big dreams and a rudimentary business plan saw the potential for a large emerging market ready for affordable small auxiliaries that could race and cruise off soundings. Top designers, with their traditional deep pocket clients, were wary of the often unreliable new fiberglass technology, with possible negative effects on their reputations, and uncertain future royalties based on imagined sales to a new, yet to be proven customer group. And finally, the new Midget Ocean Racing Club (MORC) gave dozens of racing skippers of modest means not only their own rule under which their smaller boats could race, but the opportunity to tinker, revise, re-engineer and reinvent their ‘one design’ boats to make them faster, and still take their families out to the islands off the New England coast in safety.

My Dolphin, Marionette, pictured on the cover page, is Hull #12 built in1960 by Marscot Plastics for George O'Day and Associates, Inc ( O’Day Corporation) in Fall River, MA. Her particular hybrid construction typifies the period - a guy with no boat building experience, bought a bare fiberglass hull, used a borrowed trailer to truck her to his backyard in Southport, CT and, over the next several months, built a quality wood boat on that hull.

Many of the stories about these early days of fiberglass are covered in Dan Spurr’s Heart of Glass - Fiberglass Boats and the Men Who Built Them, International Marine, 2000. Here on this site, I want to describe, and with the help of others, find out more about how Dolphins played their small but important role in these tumultuous days. In the process I wanted to find out how my Dolphin made its unique way through the nearly 50 year maze to end up in my barn with a new life. Dolphins move around in packs so Marionette wants to have other Dolphins join with her and share their experiences describing how they got their new lives. We want to help future Dolphins find their new lives through the restoration and renovation efforts of their owners.

To help get this project off the ground, on February 6, 2007, I interviewed Olin Stephens (98 years young at the time!) at his home in Hanover, NH. He allowed me to digitally record our conversation and when my technical expertise permits, audio excerpts will be on this site. This was a life experience for me.

Left: Olin, on the sofa in his Hanover, NH living room filled with mementos and awards received during his long life of achievement, surrounded by numerous piles of technical literature and current projects. Here he is accepting my wife’s world famous homemade strawberry jam as an appreciation gift for this unforgettable experience he gave me.	Right: The small silver ‘pot” in the center, inscribed to the ‘all amateur crew” of Dorade on winning the 1931 TransAtlantic Race. He was 23, winning by over 2 days elapsed time against mostly larger boats, in a boat he designed and skippered, with his father and brother in the crew. This put Olin on the track to becoming the outstanding marine architect of the last century.

At the gracious invitation of Harry Morgan and Bruce Johnson, I spent several hours on March 6, 2007 going through S&S' old Dolphin files in New York City. Unfortunately, much had been destroyed years ago in an errant mission to streamline their filing system. Among the various internal correspondences I found a quote that will warm any Dolphin owner’s heart. This from the man who, at 21, founded the leading marine architectural firm of the last century. Olin Stephens to James (Sham) Hunt, Sales Mgr, O’Day Corporation, May 12, 1965:

“..we have always thought of the Dolphin as one of our best designs…”

I had the opportunity to visit with Olin again on January 7, 2008 to give him an update on the website, and to review with him very early drafts of a Dolphin 24 book based on this site. He has many leather bound class books in his library based on designs he created, or on his winning yachts so it is only fitting that a Dolphin 24 book is there as well. Click here to see a report on that visit.

I have spoken with many of the players of that era who are still with us. Without exception they were more than willing to share their memories. I thank them for their help. A partial list of these people is shown on the acknowledgements link. Rationalizing the sometimes conflicting memories of 50 years past can be a challenge, and for me, it is one of the fascinating aspects of this project. For example, there appears to be no record of exactly how many Dolphins were built, and by whom.

Dolphins are always born again, doing new and interesting things. “Big Dot”, as an example, immediately comes to mind. Little known to most Dolphin owners she, under the patient guidance of her skipper Doug Graham, won her division, and was second (!) overall in the 1996 Transpac Single Handed Race.

Life is not 100% dedicated to developing and maintaining this kind of website so this will be an ongoing work in progress and patience on both sides is needed. The links at the left will be updated as information comes in and as time permits. So that you don’t waste your time check the What's New section for the last time we changed something and it will point you to the related subject matter. This section will also provide the reader with a chronological index from the first day the site went up on the web, March 26, 2007, to the present date.

Readers may signup for our email list - which will not be shared with third parties without your approval. There is also a Google technology search engine that search the site or the web. This service is paid for by allowing them to place ads on the search result page.

 A Forum for the exchange of information of mutual interest is up and running (also a Google free service in exchange for the placement of their ads), and I will have a members-only link - if and when we can determine if we have any reason to have such a section. A couple of reasons I am looking at is maybe having your own full blown email address system with Dophin24.org will be interesting to Dolphin owners, past owners and friends. I think it’s pretty neat and I’ve got one. Maybe after some time, and if there is interest, we can form a real Dolphin 24 Association. This will depend on finding many more of those 300 or so Dolphin owners out there. So please spread the word.

A quick note to Mermaid 24 owners and former owners. We know what you are - you are wood Dolphins! S&S told us so. You are invited to this party. Also, we invite all Shaw 24 owners because we have DNA test results confirming the role Trina and her designer Bill Shaw played in the Dolphin’s conception. And, this invitation applies also to our fin keeled offspring from New Zealand, the S&S 24 and the Falcon 24.

I hope you enjoy the site. And, I need your help to make it better. I want your Dolphin restoration stories, your pictures, technical tips, racing/cruising stories, any historical anecdotes and your comments. We will start off the site with the several Dolphins we know about. Your patience will be needed as Dreamweaver is a demanding piece of website software and it is generationally unfriendly. One of the things I have found out that it is amost impossible, at least for me, to lay out the photos and text for all the possible monitor configurations - small screen, large screen, wide screen, etc. So the lay out is set up for what looks good on my 2 different size screens. I hope it works for your set up.

Contact me at Ronbreault@dolphin24.org Pretty cool, huh? For now this probably has to be limited to contributing Dolphin owners if they want one. Let me know if you are interested – they are free for the first year, maybe longer. We’ll see.

                                                                                                Ron Breault

                                                                                                Old Lyme, CT  

Ps Another reason to do this website is to continue the work that Jim Huxford did a few years ago with his Dolphin 24 website. Jim passed away in 2002 and took most of his site with him. We have been wandering in the wilderness since.