The Rhodes 19 is a daysailer with a strong and enduring history as a competitive one-design. It began life soon after the end of World War II as a wooden centerboarder designed by Philip Rhodes and called the Hurricane. It didn't catch on back then: there was only one fleet, at Greenwich Cove, Connecticut, and it soon faded. The design resurfaced, however, in 1947, when the Southern Massachusetts Yacht Racing Association (SMYRA), seeking a new one-design class, commissioned the Palmer Scott Yard of New Bedford to finish out a fleet of bare Hurricane hulls, fitting them with keels rather than the originally specified centerboards. The new boats also had aluminum masts. Renamed the SMYRA class, a fleet developed on Buzzards Bay and around Martha’s Vineyard.In the 1950s, when fiberglass was gaining favor as a boatbuilding material, a company called Marscot Plastics took a class-sanctioned mold from a SMYRA-class boat. Marscot later joined forces with American Boat Building of East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and George O’Day, a gifted sailor from Marblehead who at the time was importing molded wooden dinghies from England. The fiberglass SMYRA became popular, and by 1958 O’Day had sole proprietorship of the boat’s production. That year he obtained Rhodes’s approval to rename the design “Rhodes 19,” and he immediately sold 50 of them; the first Rhodes 19 in Marblehead, sail No. 41, went to Dr. Randal Bell of the town’s Corinthian Yacht Club. Through the 1960s, sales skyrocketed and fleets were established in various locales—including Marblehead’s Fleet 5. The first national championship took place in 1963, and the first meeting of a new national class association was held at the Larchmont (New York) Yacht Club in 1965.O’Day was a particularly skilled, even fearless, downwind sailor. He gained his racing chops in a hand-me-down Starling Burgess-designed 14’ cat-rigged Brutal Beast in Marblehead. He was not afraid to push his boat to the limit—and beyond. On one particularly eventful July day in 1942, having graduated from Brutal Beasts, he capsized his 24’ C. Raymond Hunt-designed 110-class sloop, VINCEMUS, under spinnaker. He was inspired in his downwind sailing by the great British dinghy sailor, designer, builder, and author Uffa Fox, who pioneered the concept of planing in dinghies. Years after his formative years in Marblehead, O’Day would establish his eponymous boatbuilding company and join forces with Fox, who designed the now-ubiquitous O’Day Daysailer. The Daysailer is a step down in size, in the early O’Day fleet, from the Rhodes 19.

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