Rhodes sailboats: a naval architect's catalog, built across many yards
"Rhodes" on a listing names a designer, not a builder. Philip L. Rhodes was one of the most prolific American yacht designers of the twentieth century, and the boats that carry his name were built by Pearson, O'Day, Stuart Marine, Cape Cod Shipbuilding, General Boats, and other yards across several decades, each catalogued under its own design number in the Rhodes archive at Mystic Seaport. A buyer researching "Rhodes" is researching a design credit, not a single factory's product line.
Origins and ownership
Philip L. Rhodes (1895-1974) was born in Ohio and, per Good Old Boat's Robert Perry, did not come from a yachting background. While attending Denison University he decided to become a naval architect, transferring to MIT in 1916 and graduating in naval architecture and marine engineering in 1918; during World War I he worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. He then worked for the American Shipbuilding Co. of Lorain, Ohio, and the Union Shipbuilding Company of Baltimore, Maryland, before setting up as a self-employed designer in New York by 1925.
In 1934 Rhodes signed a formal partnership contract with Cox & Stevens, Inc. of New York, serving as the firm's chief designer from 1934 to 1947, per the MacNaughton Group's biography. In 1947, Cox & Stevens was dissolved; per MacNaughton Group, Rhodes became owner of the firm and renamed it Philip L. Rhodes, Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, which he led until his death in 1974. MacNaughton Group credits him as one of the few yacht and small-craft naval architects of his era to hold a college degree in large-ship naval architecture, and Good Old Boat's Robert Perry describes an output ranging from 12-foot Penguin dinghies to ocean racers, motorsailers, and commercial vessels.
The designers
Rhodes's small New York office trained a long line of designers who went on to careers of their own: Robert Perry's history for Good Old Boat lists Bill Tripp, Al Mason, Francis Kinney, Winthrop Warner, James McCurdy, Bob Wallstrom, and Charles Wittholz among those who got their start there. For a time the office's sole assistant was a young Olin Stephens, before he became a famous designer himself. Rhodes's son Bodie also worked in-house, drawing the Bounty II's lines as a reduction of the 29-foot-waterline sloop Altair to a 28-foot hull.
Weatherly, launched in 1958 and catalogued in the Rhodes archive as design #676, was the only 12 Metre Rhodes designed in his career, per the International 12 Metre Association. Built by Luders Marine Construction of Stamford, Connecticut, Weatherly was modified ahead of the 1962 America's Cup defense by builder A.E. "Bill" Luders and skippered by Emil "Bus" Mosbacher, who took her past Nefertiti in the defender trials before she beat the Australian challenger Gretel, keeping the Cup in Newport, Rhode Island. The Rhodes manuscript collection at Mystic Seaport holds extensive correspondence documenting the boat's design, construction, and racing.
Construction through the eras
Two builder chains carry most of what buyers encounter under the name today. The first begins with the Bounty II, catalogued as design #658. In 1956, Coleman Boat and Plastics of Sausalito, California, decided to build the new Bounty II in fiberglass, drawing on Rhodes's prior experience with smaller GRP boats; project leads Fred Coleman and Vince Lazzara brought in Seattle naval architect Bill Garden for the structural engineering, since fiberglass data was still scarce. Good Old Boat's Robert Perry called it the first large fiberglass sailboat, and the Pearson Yachts Portal credits it with establishing GRP's viability for larger production boats. Coleman was later renamed AeroMarine Plastics Corp.; when it closed in 1960, Grumman executives bought its assets and shipped the Bounty II tooling to Pearson, a builder in which Grumman already held a controlling interest. Pearson cousins Everett and Clint Pearson made modest changes - raised freeboard, a relocated engine, two windows in place of one - and marketed the result as the Rhodes 41; both boats share design #658 in the archive. Pearson built roughly 50 Rhodes 41s between 1961 and 1968.
The second runs through the Rhodes 19. Per Small Boats Magazine, it began life soon after World War II as a wooden centerboarder Rhodes called the Hurricane. The design resurfaced in 1947, when the Southern Massachusetts Yacht Racing Association commissioned the Palmer Scott Yard of New Bedford to finish a fleet of bare Hurricane hulls with keels instead of centerboards, renaming the class SMYRA. In the 1950s, as fiberglass gained favor, Marscot Plastics took a class-sanctioned mold from a SMYRA-class boat, then joined forces with American Boat Building of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and sailor George O'Day. By 1958, O'Day had sole proprietorship of the boat's production and that year obtained Rhodes's approval to rename it the Rhodes 19, selling 50 immediately. O'Day, who founded the O'Day Company that same year and built more than 30,000 fiberglass-hulled boats overall, discontinued the Rhodes 19 by 1980 amid rising materials costs and a poor economy. In 1984, Stuart Marine - founded by Rhodes 19 sailor Stuart Sharaga for the express purpose of building the class - produced its first Rhodes 19, continuing the design.
Lines and generations
The catalog reaches beyond those two lines. The Rhodes 27, launched in 1939 from Henry Nevins's yard on City Island, New York, was later also built in Germany by Abeking and Rasmussen, with more than 40 built in total. The Rhodes 18, design #448 in the archive, has been built by Cape Cod Shipbuilding Co. of Wareham, Massachusetts, since as early as 1948, with some 700 launched in centerboard and keel versions, per Small Boats Magazine. The Swiftsure 33, design #692, was built in the Netherlands by G. deVries Lentch, Inc. and sold through Seafarer Yachts between 1959 and 1965. The Rhodes 22, a shoal keel/centerboard trailerable cruiser designed in 1960, entered production with General Boats in 1968; Practical Sailor's review noted its molded-in keel eliminates the keelbolt problems common on older boats.
Who Rhodes is for
Buyers drawn to the Rhodes name are usually chasing one of several threads: the design office that trained a generation of naval architects; the fiberglass-pioneer chain running from the Bounty II to the Pearson Rhodes 41; the enduring one-design Rhodes 19, still built today by Stuart Marine; or the America's Cup pedigree of Weatherly, Rhodes's sole 12 Metre. None of them are buying a single factory's product - the Rhodes name marks a design credit carried across a dozen different yards, and the model directory is where that credit turns into a specific hull, builder, and era.
