These pictures supplied by Mark Zerega, taken by his father Phil Zerega in conjunction with his purchase in 1960 of a bare fiberglass hull, #12, on which he built a wood boat named Teal. Click here to go to Teal

This is the original plug used to make the molds for the Dolphin. We need to exactly place the location of this picture, possibly the yard outside the Fall River plant or maybe the 'old Beetle Cat' facility in New Bedford where the boats were assembed and fitted out. Looks like a marine railway in the foreground. And we know that the New Bedford yard had a marine railway.

Who's the guy in the checkered shirt - Palmer Scott? Seeing this photo got your webmaster thinking about another, unrelated checkered shirt mystery. Click here to to check out that mystery

Dolphin's have such beautiful lines...I wonder whose boat this was?

An inboard being installed. You can see the starboard head locker and the port side galley set up.

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May 22, 2009

We are trying to find out exactly where the 2 Marscot Plastics facitities were located. They were on opposite sides of the Acushnet River which divides New Bedford on the west and the smaller Fair Haven on the east. This is the nautical chart of the area.

The history is a bit murky but Palmer Scott's boat yard was located in New Bedford for many years. In 1954 hurricane Carol struck the area with 100+ mph winds, gusts to 125 and a 14ft surge. This destroyed the north end of the yard that contained the wooden boat section, and only the Marscot Plastics operations survived. This story is recounted in the Merry Maiden story by Tolly Cartwright, Palmer's daughter. There is more on the Merry Maiden and Palmer Scott  - click here to go there.

Anyway, someday we will mark on this map the two locations that were involved in building the Dolphin. An interesting tidbit - at the bottom of the picture is the hurricane sea wall built in the early 1960's hurricane to protect the inner harbor. It is over 9000 ft long, 20 feet above mean sea level, with 2 massive 440 ton gates in the center that can be closed in a storm. Built by the Corps of Engrs, it is the largest stone structure on the east coast.

In this same time period, according to one version of the story, in the early 1950's Carl Beetle and Palmer Scott, both pioneers in the game, were competing with each other making fiberglass dinghies. Beetle sold his business to a company that eventually became Concordia and Leo Talesmanik, who had been building Beetle Cats for many years somehow got associated with Palmer on the Dolphin and perhaps other boats as well. Together they were the key people that built the Dolphin - Palmer producing the fiberglass parts at a mill building in Fair Haven that George O'Day bought into which Marscot Plastics was moved - and Leo who supervised their assembly and fitting out.

Stay tuned for more on this story

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