Dyer sailboats: a founder's name on a company with a different one
The Anchorage, Inc., of Warren, Rhode Island, has been building boats named after the company's founder, Bill Dyer, since 1930 — worth stating plainly up front, because the brand on the hull and the name on the corporate paperwork never match. The Anchorage got its start in Providence as a dealer for boat lines including Elco and Chris-Craft, building small boats of its own alongside that dealership, before the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 forced a move to the Warren River in Warren, Rhode Island.
Origins and ownership
Bill Dyer was a former cotton broker who had drifted into boatbuilding before the Depression. Per Soundings, he spent the 1940s writing to other builders experimenting with plastics and traveling to see their results firsthand — groundwork that led to The Anchorage's own fiberglass boats within the decade. The yard he built weathered a devastating fire a generation after the 1938 hurricane, Soundings reports, and at its height employed as many as 35 workers; its factory has produced some 30,000 vessels across dozens of designs. Long-term employees, most of Portuguese descent, have averaged 30 years of service at The Anchorage, and Tad Jones, Bill Dyer's grandson, has credited his grandfather's philosophy simply as building a quality boat — a standard he said the company continued to be guided by after Dyer's death.
Ownership passed down inside the family from there. When Bill Dyer died in 1964, the company went to his wife, Helen Dyer. Their daughter Virginia — Tad Jones's mother — also ran The Anchorage for a time. Tad's brother, Dyer Jones — whose first name is Dyer, a coincidence of naming rather than a reference back to the founder — then ran the company from the 1970s through the early 1990s before retiring. Tad Jones, a third-generation boatbuilder, went on to lead The Anchorage together with his sister, Anna Jones.
Construction through the eras
The 10-foot Dyer Dink, a wooden lapstrake dinghy, was one of the company's first boats. It was followed by the nine-foot Dyer Dhow, built out of plywood in the early 1940s and, per Mystic Seaport Museum's history of the Dhow fleet, the most famous boat in the Dyer line. The Dhow's origin is a wartime story: The Anchorage was contracted during World War II to supply lifeboats carried aboard small minesweepers and PT boats, and the Dhow was the boat built to answer that call. On the Pacific front, Dhows served as rescue units, dropped into the water over shipwrecks to give survivors safety until they could be picked up. Anna Jones, Bill Dyer's granddaughter, has told Mystic Seaport that the War Department asked her grandfather during the war to build a boat that would fit into nine feet of space and hold nine men — by her account, the reason the Dhow measures nine feet.
In 1949, The Anchorage built the first fiberglass sailing dinghy based on that wartime plywood Dhow. Per Mystic Seaport Museum, the Dhow was not the first boat ever built of fiberglass, but it stands as one of the longest continuously built fiberglass boats in the industry's history. Its hard-chine, flat-bottom design — with a wide beam and full bow sections added for stability and load-carrying capacity — suits teaching sailing to all ages, and it can hold up to four people, or roughly 650 pounds. Many owners use the same hull as a rowboat or a powerboat as well as a sailboat.
Lines and generations
The nine-foot Dhow was followed in the model line by the 7-foot-11-inch Midget and the 12.5-foot Daysailer, rounding out a small-boat range built for sailing, rowing, and light power use; the yard has built on the order of 50 to 60 of these dinghies a year. The catalog also runs to the Delta 19, just under 19 feet and built in the mid-1960s, and the 10-foot-6 DT that followed in 1977.
The Anchorage has also built a separate line of larger powerboats under the Dyer name — the Dyer 29, first built by Bill Dyer from a 1955 design by Nick Potter, and the Dyer 40, introduced in 1960, along with the Glamour Girl, a launch or utility vessel. That line speaks to the company's scale, but it is a distinct family from the sailing and rowing dinghies described above.
Who Dyer is for
Dyer's dinghies suit sailors who want a small, stable, do-everything boat rather than a cruiser: the Dhow's hard-chine hull was built to teach sailing to all ages and doubles as a rowboat or tender, and the range around it — from the compact Midget to the roomier Daysailer — gives buyers a size to match the job. It also suits buyers drawn to a yard that has stayed inside one family, from founder Bill Dyer through his grandson Tad Jones and Tad's sister Anna Jones.
