Edey & Duff sailboats: a small yard built to other designers' plans
Edey & Duff Ltd. was a Mattapoisett, Massachusetts boatbuilder that never designed its own line. Instead it built fiberglass versions of designs it admired: S. S. Crocker's wooden Stone Horse sloop, Nathanael Herreshoff's 1914 Herreshoff 12½ (built and sold as the Doughdish), and Phil Bolger's Dovekie rowing-sailing dinghy. Founded in 1968 by two Buzzards Bay sailors and sold in 1986, the yard operated for roughly four decades before closing in 2009.
Origins and ownership
Edey & Duff was established in 1968 in a chance meeting of two Buzzards Bay area classic sailboat owners: Peter Duff stopped to admire Mait Edey's 23-foot wooden Stone Horse sloop, designed by S. S. Crocker of Manchester, and the two struck up a friendship. That friendship led them to form a company, bearing their names, to build the Crocker-designed Stone Horse in fiberglass. Their first Stone Horse was built in Duff's home and backyard and launched at Aucoot Cove in 1970.
Duff was an unlikely boatbuilder: born in 1936 and raised in the suburbs west of Boston, he graduated from Tufts University in 1958 with a degree in nuclear physics before turning to wooden-boat reproduction. He died on 30 August 2008, of Parkinson's disease, at age 72.
Over its first 19 years, the yard built 150 Stone Horses along with hundreds of other classic sailboats, and The Standard-Times, marking the company's 30th anniversary in 1999, credited it with a reputation for fine craftsmanship, one boat at a time. Facing declining health, Edey and Duff sold the company to a customer, Anthony Andersen, a Minnesota businessman, in 1986; by 1999 it was led by a management team of Joe Keogh as general manager, David Davignon as sales manager, and Ed Pavao as general foreman, all of whom had worked there since the company's early days.
Trade Only Today's obituary of Duff gives a fuller, later count: almost 1,200 boats built in all, including the 150 Stone Horses, the shoal-draft Shearwater and Dovekie, the Herreshoff-designed Doughdish and Stuart Knockabout, and the Sakonnet 23 — a different scope and date than the 19-year figure, not a number to add to it. Edey & Duff itself closed in 2009, when its general manager, Dave Davignon, died.
The designers
Edey & Duff credited outside architects for every line it built, and the credits never merge. The Stone Horse was Crocker's alone: a cruiser-racer he drew in 1931, initially built in wood at Harwich Port, Massachusetts, with 38 wooden hulls completed before the Second World War. Edey & Duff's founding purpose, from 1968, was building that hull in fiberglass.
The Doughdish's design runs back further and belongs to someone else entirely. Buzzards Bay businessman Robert Emmons and friends approached Nathanael Herreshoff to create a smaller boat their children could handle in the bay's challenging conditions, and the H Class Association's history of the design records that Herreshoff Mfg. Co. of Bristol, Rhode Island built the first Herreshoff 12½s from his design in 1914, completing 364 in all. After Herreshoff died in 1938, production continued at his company until 1943, then passed to the licensed Quincy Adams Yacht Yard (51 hulls, 1943–1948) and then to Cape Cod Shipbuilding (about 35 wooden hulls, 1948–1950). In 1973, Bill Harding created a fiberglass reproduction for the H Class, taking his molds from the lines of three original wooden 12½ hulls; he deliberately skipped the weight reductions fiberglass construction would have allowed, so the boat — trademarked Doughdish, a name the Herreshoff Marine Museum traces to the Italian word for twelve, dodici — would be authentic in everything but material and could race the wooden Twelves at parity in the H Class. For many years, Doughdishes were produced by Edey & Duff of Mattapoisett: the yard built Harding's design, not its own. Production passed on after Harding's retirement — one account credits Stephen Ballentine and his daughter Amy Ballentine Stevens at Ballentine's Boat Shop, another names Doughdish, Inc. and Doughdish, LLC as successors.
The Dovekie carries a third credit, "the Phil Bolger/Edey & Duff rowing-sailing design." The yard's broader roster of classic sailboats and dinghies also drew on designs by L. Francis Herreshoff, Nathanael Herreshoff, Lyle Hess, and Joel White.
Construction through the eras
The Stone Horse crossed the same material transition much of the classic-yacht world did: wood through the prewar years, then a Crocker hull redesigned for Airex-core fiberglass construction with wood trim once Edey & Duff began building it in 1968, carrying a deep, beamy full-keel hull with a keel-hung rudder.
The Doughdish's fiberglass construction was more exacting, built to match a design fixed in 1914. Its foam-sandwich hull runs roughly 3/4 inch thick, with fiberglass bulkheads and decks finished in a simulated canvas anti-skid surface, an oiled-teak cockpit sole with removable center slats for bilge access, teak trim at the sheer strake, toe rails, coamings, and transom, bronze and stainless-steel hardware, and foam flotation built into the forward and aft compartments.
Lines and generations
Three lines carried the Edey & Duff name. The Stone Horse, the yard's founding boat, ran to about 150 hulls in total before the line ended with the company's own closure. The Doughdish, introduced in 1973 at roughly 15.8 feet overall, was the yard's one-design racer, built to Herreshoff's original 12½ dimensions. The Dovekie, Bolger's rowing-sailing design, ran from 1978 to 1998 at about 21.4 feet overall. Late in its history, in 1989, the yard stepped briefly outside sail: working with Key West fishing guides and naval architect C. Raymond Hunt of Boston, it built the 27-foot Conch, a sportfishing powerboat that proved popular among anglers and guides.
Who Edey & Duff is for
Edey & Duff suits a buyer drawn to fiberglass reproductions of significant American small-boat designs rather than a marque with its own design office: a Crocker cruiser, a Herreshoff one-design built to class-legal weight, a Bolger dinghy, each carrying its designer's name alongside the builder's. With the yard itself closed since 2009, buying into any of the three lines means buying a fixed, closed-production population defined by pedigree and condition rather than a current catalog or dealer network.
