Alcort sailboats: the Connecticut yard that built the Sunfish and carried its name through a long chain of later owners
Alcort, Inc. began in Waterbury, Connecticut, when childhood friends Alexander "Al" Bryan and Cortlandt "Cort" Heyniger combined pieces of their first names into a company in 1946 and, in 1947, designed their first boat: the 11-foot-7 Sailfish, built in Waterbury, Connecticut. Before the Sailfish, Alcort's market had been iceboats, and the pair had spent the 1930s working on one before shifting to a small paddleboard meant as a Red Cross rescue craft. The Sailfish caught on well enough that Alcort soon widened its hull and added a cockpit to create a second, more comfortable design — the Sunfish — which went on to outgrow both its parent boat and, in time, Alcort's own ownership of it. That growth carried the Sunfish, and the Alcort name, through a fiberglass construction era and a long chain of later owners.
Origins and ownership
Bryan, a Yale graduate, and Heyniger, a Dartmouth graduate, both served in World War II before returning to Waterbury — Bryan in the Army Air Corps, Heyniger in the Navy. Looking back on the partnership in 1982, Bryan told a Sports Illustrated writer that neither of them had had real business goals: "We just wanted to be on our own. We were just looking for something to do, something fun." That attitude carried Alcort from a two-man Sailfish shop into a manufacturer known for small, accessible sailboats, building first on South Main Street and later on South Leonard Street in Waterbury's South End, where the Sunfish became the best-selling sailboat in the country.
Bryan and Heyniger sold Alcort to American Machine and Foundry Company (AMF) in 1969, and the business became AMF Alcort — a sale that led to the closure of the original Waterbury factory. AMF held the business until mid-1985, when Minstar Corporation's Irwin Jacobs bought AMF with the intention of spinning Alcort off, seeing no benefit in continuing to support the Sunfish class organization. On February 14, 1986, David Loveless and Jerry DeGarmo bought the business outright and renamed it Alcort Sailboats, Inc. Two years later, in 1988, Loveless and DeGarmo sold to Pearson Yachts of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, under J. Gordon Clayton — a company that filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991. From Pearson's small-boat assets, Peter Johnstone formed SunfishLaser, Inc. that same year, primarily funded by North Marine Group, the parent of North Sails; in March 1997, SunfishLaser sold the Sunfish brand to Vanguard Sailboats, led by Chip Johns and Steve Clark. Vanguard merged with Performance Sailcraft Europe in 2007 to form Laser Performance. Per SERO Sailing's own published account, the most recent link in that chain is SERO's stewardship of global Sunfish production.
The designers
Bryan and Heyniger designed the Sailfish, and later the Sunfish, themselves. The Sunfish emerged when the pair widened the Sailfish's hull and added a cockpit — Alcort's own class association dates the redesign to 1951, reportedly prompted by Bryan's pregnant wife finding the Sailfish's flat deck uncomfortable, though some retrospective accounts place the same redesign a year later, in 1952. Heyniger also drew the Sunfish's fish logo by tracing a nickel and adding fins, a tail and an eye. Fittings came from a nearby Connecticut supplier: Wilcox and Crittenden of Middletown manufactured the bronze and brass hardware used on every Alcort boat. Decades later, in October 1986, the by-then-renamed Alcort Sailboats, Inc. partnered with sailmaker Hans Fogh, then of North Sails, to develop what the company called a consistent, ultimate Sunfish sail shape.
Construction through the eras
Alcort's boats began as wood: early Sailfish spars were cut from Sitka spruce. Fiberglass arrived in 1959, and its low cost and ease of production drove the Sunfish's spread; Alcort followed in 1960 with a fiberglass Sailfish variant, the Super Sailfish MK II. Spars evolved alongside the hulls, moving from spruce to a mid-generation hybrid of an aluminum base with a wooden top, and finally to fully aluminum spars from the late 1950s on. Through the Alcort and AMF-Alcort years, aluminum spars replaced spruce fleet-wide, Dacron sails replaced cotton, and ash tillers replaced mahogany; in 1971, a spring-loaded kickup rudder system developed for the Minifish replaced the boats' original brass rudder fittings. Sunfish and Sailfish production ran out of Waterbury's South End between 1958 and 1969, ending with the AMF acquisition and the closure of the original factory.
Lines and generations
The Sailfish came first — an 11-foot-7 board-boat with almost no cockpit — and stayed in the catalog into the 1960s: the plywood Standard Sailfish was phased out in the mid-1960s, and even the fiberglass Super Sailfish kit was gone by the late 1960s. The Sunfish, widened and cockpited from that same hull, became the line-defining design, honored by the American Sailboat Hall of Fame in 1995 as the most popular fiberglass boat ever designed, with a quarter million sold worldwide by that point. The lineup also included a 1964 model, the 13-foot-2 Catfish catamaran.
Who Alcort is for
Alcort's own account of its founding — two friends who, in Bryan's words, had "no real goals in business" and just wanted to build something fun — matches the boats the company actually produced: small, simply built craft meant to be sailed rather than admired. The Sunfish, widened and cockpited from the Sailfish specifically for greater comfort and stability, reached a quarter million sales worldwide by 1995 and earned an American Sailboat Hall of Fame commendation the same year — a track record that points toward buyers who want an uncomplicated, easily transported boat rather than one built for interior space or long-distance cruising.