In Our Wake: What’s the first fiberglass powerboat?
Is this the first production fiberglass powerboat?
Were I to ask you the first company to mass-produce a fiberglass powerboat, how might you answer? Boston Whaler or perhaps Hatteras? Nope, you’d be nearly a decade off. The first fiberglass production boats actually came to market right after World War II. To actually figure out who made it to consumers first, you go down a bit of a rabbit hole, but the safe bet on the polyester production pioneer would be a man named H. Taylor Winner Jr.
Originally a wooden boatbuilder from Trenton, N.J., Winner saw early promise in resins after an Ohioan named Ray Green built a fiberglass boat in 1942. “Then right after the war, he, along with Taylor Winner, Gar Wood Jr. and a few others decided to try and mass-produce everything from eight-foot dinghies to 14-foot powerboats,” said Daniel Spurr, author of a definitive work called Heart of Glass: Fiberglass Boats and the Men Who Built Them.
Some, said Spurr, might argue that Wood, the son of legendary boat racer Gar Wood Sr., was the first. But his early “Gar Form” builds were plagued with problems, leaving the door open for Winner to unveil his PlastiCraft line at the New York National Boat Show in 1947. Winner built with a dangerous high-pressure molding process and wood decking. There was nothing particularly special about the hull shapes, said Spurr, but the boats were very tough—and a few are still around today. By 1949, the year the brochure pictured above came out, Winner infused Owens Corning glass fibers into his boats instead of vegetable based sisal threads, which made them tougher still. Yet these hardy boats were a tough sell.
“There was a lot of suspicion,” said Spurr. “I heard the phrase, ‘If God wanted fiberglass boats, he would have made fiberglass trees.’ They were plastic and there was this whole stigma after the war—with Japanese plastic products. They’re regarded as cheap. They’re gonna melt in the sun. They’re gonna shatter like glass.”
Gar Wood Jr. went out of business after producing some 2,000 hulls. Winner Manufacturing built the U.S. Navy’s first fiberglass boat, a 28-foot personnel carrier, and then went on to have considerable success up through the 1970’s, but Winner’s PlastiCraft line never really took off. Still, Spurr says the dangerous, mad scientist work of folks like Green, Wood and Winner should not be forgotten, because it paved the way for every fiberglass boat sitting in a marina or on an assembly line today. “They didn’t have the federal government, OSHA or anybody coming into their shops and looking at how they stored materials or kept cigarettes away from resin-soaked rags and catalyst. Many of these early shops had fires—explosions. It was part of the legend—how these boat builders even survived.”
This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
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