Name Dolphin

DOLPHIN was built in 1909 by John Bowden at Porthleven, Cornwall, and is shorter than most other surviving pilot cutters, partly because she has a transom stern. Nothing is known of her service as a pilot cutter, and it is almost certain that DOLPHIN was not her original name. In the early 1920s she was bought by Victor Allcard, of Appledore, and was by then a yacht. Allcard sold her to Emma Maud Weeding in 1933, and in the thirties DOLPHIN is recorded as having a Thornycroft petrol engine. The cutter was sold to the owner’s friend George Nash in 1949, and he sailed her to Holland frequently and once to Norway. Nash became a curator at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and on his death DOLPHIN passed to his son. Later she was sold to Ken Briggs, and in 1998 to Roger Capps, in whose ownership she sank at Dournanez, before he sailed her to the Baltic and then Norway and inside the Arctic Circle to Spitzbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, which he circumnavigated, retracing the path taken by H W Tilman in his pilot cutter MISCHIEF in 1974. DOLPHIN has spent a number of summers in the Arctic and is now based at Swansea.

Source: Historic Sail, Britain's surviving working craft, Paul Brown, the History Press.

Update, Nov 2023: Vessel for sale and alongside in Gloucester.

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