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A Very Short History of The Sunfish
Alex "Red or Al" Bryan and
Cortlandt "Bud or Cort" Heyniger of Waterbury, Connecticut designed the Sunfish.
The design was an evolution that progressed from Sailfish to Super
Sailfish and to Sunfish.
![[Left: Al, Right: Cort]](images46/alcort1a.jpg) The
original name of the company was Alcort. The company name could have been
Cortal, but Alcort listed first in the telephone book, so it was selected.
About 1941 Al and Cort, while still
in school, started building and selling Skeeter class iceboats. The
skeeters were built in a barn. They carried 752 ft of
sail. This sail size was used on later sailboat designs. To
provide year round work a summer product was needed, so the Sailfish
sailboat was created.
The first Sailfish design was 14 ft
long, but 14 ft long sheets of plywood were not available, so the boat was
redesigned to be 12 ft long.
Production of the Sailfish began
about June of 1945 with both kits and completed boats being made
available.
The Sailfish was featured
in a Life Magazine article and production increased from a![[Sailfish Kit]](images46/sailfish2a.jpg) few boats a year
to where a factory was needed to keep up with the orders.
The Sailfish and Super
Sailfish did not have a cockpit, so the sailor had to sit on top the
decking with legs stretched out in front. This configuration was not
comfortable, especially for long periods of time. This was the impetus for
the Sunfish design and development.
Sunfish came into being in
1952, 1953, or 1954. No one seems to be able to pin the date for sure.
The company’s first employee, Carl Meinert, drew his idea for the Sunfish
on the shop floor and the Sunfish was born. Then a cockpit was added to
the
 deck. Super Sailfish parts; sails,
transom, rudder and spars were used on Sunfish. Heyniger designed
the famous Sunfish Logo by putting a nickel on a piece of paper and
drawing a circle around it and adding a tail, mouth, fins and eye to the
circle.
In 1958 the third plant was
out grown, so Alcort designed and built a plant to their own
specifications. The boat hulls were still made of wood.
In 1959 Joe Schmit of
Naugatuck Chemical Company convinced Alcort to try fiberglass. The Super
Sailfish was produced in fiberglass in 1959 and the Sunfish manufacturing
process was changed over to fiberglass in 1960. Several changes to the
design came with the fiberglass. One change was that the fiberglass
hulls weighted more than the wooden hulls. For the first couple of
years the wooden and fiberglass hulls were nearly equally competitive.
Later the fiberglass boats were faster than the wooden ones.
The Sailfish was phased out
in 1962, but the Super Sailfish stayed in production for several more
years with 100 to 200 hulls a year being built and sold.
Alcort stopped marketing
kits in the mid-60s.
In the mid-60s Alcort
needed support because the rapid growth of business overwhelmed them. They
picked AMF as the best choice to take over the business. In 1969 Alcort
was sold to AMF and by 1982 over 200,000 Sunfish had been build and sold.
Alcort did not use chopper
guns in the production process. A hand lay-up in a female mold process was
used through out the line of boats. This production process provided a
high quality product, but was labor intensive. AMF manufactured the
boats after 1969 and I have not located their history.
Ten Cate (pronounced Kata)
manufactured the Sunfish under license in Holland. Korna Boats of Canada
produced the boats in their Clinton, Ontario, plant. New plants were built
in Chile and Uruguay to produce the boat under license. Fogh, a Danish
company, manufactured sails. They produced Sunfish sails for many years.
Vanguard took over the
Sunfish from AMF several years ago and have continued manufacturing the
boat.
The first Sailfish sold for
$128.50 and the first Sunfish was sold for $195.00.
The primary source of information in this article
was:
The Sunfish Book
By Will White
Published in 1983 by l Books, 34
Commercial Wharf, Boston, Massachusetts, 02110
ISBN 0-914814-31-1
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