O'Day sailboats: an Olympic sailor's design partnership that grew into America's largest builder
George O'Day was an Olympic gold medalist and America's Cup sailor before he was a boatbuilder, and the company he founded in 1958 grew, for a time, into the largest sailboat producer in the United States. That trajectory ran through a design partnership with British dinghy designer Uffa Fox, a long-running relationship with the Boston design office C. Raymond Hunt Associates, two changes of conglomerate ownership, and a bankruptcy in 1989 that closed the books on roughly three decades of production.
Origins and ownership
Before founding the company, George O'Day skippered a McMillan Cup win in 40-foot yawls while at Harvard, won an Olympic Gold Medal in the 5.5 Metre class at the 1960 Rome Games, and sailed as assistant helmsman and tactician for Bus Mosbacher aboard Weatherly and Intrepid in successful America's Cup defenses in 1962 and 1967. He started O'Day Corp. in 1958, building boats at a plant at 168 Stevens Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, before moving the entire operation at the end of 1969 to a newly built 164,487-square-foot facility at 848 Airport Road, which O'Day's own 1970 sailboats catalog touted as "the most modern construction center in the industry."
By 1966, with O'Day established as the largest sailboat builder in the country, George O'Day sold the company to the Bangor Punta conglomerate; Bangor Punta, and O'Day with it, was bought in turn by Lear Siegler in 1984. O'Day Sailboats declared bankruptcy in April 1989, with Lance Funston serving as president at the time of the collapse. The builder has been out of business since, but D&R Marine, run by Rudy Nickerson, still stocks parts for O'Day sailboats from 12 to 25 feet.
The designers
The Day Sailer, O'Day's first product, came from a 1956 partnership between George O'Day and British designer Uffa Fox: Fox designed the planing hull, and O'Day designed the cuddy to broaden its appeal to the recreational market. A second dinghy line traced back further still — a wooden centerboarder called the Hurricane, designed after World War II by Philip Rhodes, was later reworked with a keel and, in 1958, renamed the Rhodes 19 with Rhodes's own approval.
For the bulk of its cruising range, O'Day turned to C. Raymond Hunt Associates, a firm founded in 1961 as a partnership between Ray Hunt and John Deknatel, who went on to serve as its president for 45 years; Hunt himself, who died in 1978, was also known for developing the deep-V powerboat hull and the early Boston Whalers. Led by Deknatel, the firm designed the O'Day 20, 22, 23, 25, and 26 between 1972 and 1987, and its own client list groups "Cal/O'Day" among the production builders it counted as clients. The one exception is the O'Day 40: design credit is disputed in the record itself, with some sources naming Hunt Associates and others Philippe Briand, and even a dedicated review of the boat could not confirm either with certainty.
Construction through the eras
O'Day's hulls were typically a solid, hand-laid fiberglass laminate of mat and roving joined to a structural fiberglass liner pan, with decks cored in end-grain balsa; the hull-to-deck joint was a shoebox design secured with screws and 3M 5200. Deck areas beneath factory-installed fittings were usually built up in solid fiberglass or plywood rather than balsa, to prevent the core from saturating with moisture there. O'Day was also among the first major builders to standardize on diesel auxiliary power. The one significant departure from this formula was the 1985 O'Day 40, the largest model the company ever built: instead of a solid-glass hull, it used a cored composite of three-quarter-inch balsa, polyester resin, and biaxial fiberglass cloth.
Lines and generations
The Day Sailer anchored the small-boat side of the lineup for decades. The first boats sold in 1958 and were immediately popular in both the recreational and racing markets; the Day Sailer II arrived in 1971 with built-in foam flotation, and a Day Sailer III followed from 1985 to 1990 with higher transom freeboard that made it ineligible for one-design racing, unlike the earlier two. O'Day built the original Day Sailer I, II, and III in Fall River from 1957 to 1990; since 1994, the design has been built exclusively under license by Cape Cod Shipbuilding Company of Wareham, Massachusetts, using molds owned by the Day Sailer Class Association rather than by the builder itself.
On the cruising side, the Hunt Associates-designed O'Day 25, a keel-centerboard masthead sloop first built in 1975, ran for 2,898 hulls before its 1984 replacement by the O'Day 26. The O'Day 30, whose hull and keel shape Practical Sailor described as "clean and modern without being extreme," saw more than 350 boats built between 1977 and 1984 before a 1984 update — a new keel and rudder and a lengthened stern with a European-style boarding platform — was rebadged the O'Day 31 and continued, on a hull-number series unbroken from the 30, until 1986. The O'Day 40 sat atop the range from its 1985 introduction until the company's 1989 close. A separate Mariner line, built at both the Stevens Street and Airport Road plants, ended production in 1979.
Who O'Day is for
O'Day suits buyers drawn to a brand with a genuine small-boat racing pedigree — the Day Sailer and Rhodes 19 both trace to named designers and decades of one-design competition — alongside a cruising range built in volume from a single, recurring design office. Because the company changed ownership twice and closed abruptly in 1989, the range is best approached model by model rather than as one continuous design generation.
