Boston Whaler
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| Founded | June 5, 1958 |
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| Founder | Dick Fisher |
| Headquarters | Edgewater, Florida, United States |
| Products | Fiberglass boats |
| Parent | Brunswick Boat Group |
Boston Whaler is an American boat manufacturer located in Florida. It is operated as a subsidiary of the Brunswick Boat Group, a division of the Brunswick Corporation. Boston Whalers were originally manufactured in Massachusetts, but are currently manufactured in Edgewater, Florida.
Dick Fisher graduated from Harvard University in 1936. He ran a company building small, lightweight boats out of balsa wood. He designed a rowboat and got the materials to build it, but he never completed it.
In the 1950s, polyurethane foam, a stiff, lightweight, buoyant material, was invented. Fisher imagined it as a replacement for the lightweight balsa pine used in small boat construction, and in 1954 he constructed a small sailing dinghy filled with the foam, with a design similar to the Sunfish. He showed the finished product to his friend, naval architect C. Raymond Hunt. Hunt recognized potential in the process, however he did not feel the design was particularly suited to sailboats. Instead, he created a design based on the Hickman Sea Sled featuring a cathedral hull.
Fisher built a prototype out of Styrofoam and epoxy. "It had two keels," said Fisher, "one inverted V between the runners and an anti-skid, anti-trip chine." Fisher tested the boat all that summer and thought it was “the greatest thing ever”. That fall, Fisher started running the boat in rough weather, and found that the hull displayed issues with handling and cavitation. Under heavy load, and off-plane, the cavity in the middle of the hull forced air into the water, and then back into the prop. Fisher approached Hickman, the original designer of the Sea Sled for a solution. However, Hickman thought his design needed no modifications. Fisher contemplated putting "some stuff on the bottom to move that airy water out of there." He used a method of trial and error, laying fiberglass on the bottom of the hull in the morning and running the boat behind his house when the glass cured. If the design did not work, he would bring it back to his house and start over.
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