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Though he was looking for the Northwest Passage, Estevan Gomez couldn’t help but notice the abundance of trees. The first known European to explore the Maine Coast (he sailed up the Penobscot in 1525 as far as present-day Bangor before concluding that it was a river) charted the bays, islands, and small coves, and somehow managed to keep his caravel off the myriad ledges that still bedevil modern mariners. Maybe he wasn’t all that worried about a wreck, with all that building material around.
Before paper mills, before potatoes, long before gas-powered tourism, Maine built boats. The state’s oldest industry has weathered centuries of social, economic, and technological change. “Boatbuilding has been ongoing on this coast for more than 400 years,” says Steve White, owner and president of Brooklin Boatyard.
Like the coast itself, the boatbuilding industry is varied and complex. It encompasses some 200 business establishments ranging in size from more than 50 employees to one- and two-person shops, scattered up and down the state’s zigzag coastline. Maine’s boatbuilders employ diverse technologies, building in metal, fiberglass, wood, and a variety of wood and fiberglass composites. Most boatbuilders are also involved in a host of related services, including maintenance, storage, marina operations, marine repairs, chartering, and tour-boat businesses. In fact, the typical year-round boatbuilding yard derives between one-third and one half of its income from storage and repair. Only a few of the larger companies, such as Hinckley Yachts in Southwest Harbor, are exclusively engaged in the building of boats.
Jane Wellehan is president of Maine Built Boats (MBB), a nonprofit trade group founded in 2005 dedicated to marketing and promoting the Maine boatbuilding “brand” to the world. The organization now lists 49 members, including boatbuilders, designers, marinas, sailmakers, suppliers, and schools. Maine Built Boats partners with the state and federal governments to develop business initiatives for the boatbuilding industry and to support training of workers and development of new technologies as they apply to boatbuilding. “We’re a collection of a lot of small voices,” Wellehan says.
Some of those voices were documented in a 2007 report commissioned by MBB entitled “Maine’s Boatbuilding Industry: Obstacles and Opportunities.” According to the report, the industry in 2006 encompassed some 200 businesses employing approximately 2,500 people, with sales of $355 million and a total payroll of over $92 million. Though the figures are estimates, the report notes that the boatbuilding industry is larger by sales volume than the state’s biotech and commercial printing industries, both of which employ roughly the same number of Mainers as boatbuilding. It is about half the size of Maine’s fabricated metals industry, and one-third the size of the state’s wood products industry.
“A lot of boatbuilding in Maine is made up of small businesses,” says Nate Hopkins, president of Atlantic Boat Company in Brooklin. The survey bears this out. Nearly half of Maine’s boatbuilders employ fewer than five people. Another 25% of the business is made up of midsized yards with five to 10 employees. A relative handful of large (50 or more employees) operations provide more than half the jobs. With size come higher wages, health insurance and other benefits, and a modicum of job security in an ever-changing market.
Making one’s living from the sea is the essence of unpredictability—ask any fisherman. Catches fluctuate from season to season, the price of fuel has soared, and regulations enacted to protect marine life can add thousands of dollars in costs for new equipment. The business of boatbuilding reflects the vagaries of working on the water. In recent years, the focus of Maine’s boatbuilding industry has shifted away from commercial boats toward high-end yachts.
“The incentive for fishermen to buy a new boat isn’t there,” says John Hutchins, who builds kit boats at Northern Bay Boats, a three-person shop in Penobscot. “A Maine car rusts out after 10 years, but a fiberglass lobsterboat doesn’t rust out.”
Like many builders, Hutchins has survived by branching out into the pleasure boat market, capitalizing on the popularity of lobsterboat hulls. “Building commercial work boats for Maine fishermen is essentially dead,” he says. “Traditional lobsterboat builders like me are existing by building sport fisherman boats or yachts, mostly going out of state or Canada.”
Though at one time the majority of Northern Bay Boats business was commercial work, says Hopkins, “now 90% of it is pleasure boats.”
“I think it’s cyclical,” Wellehan says. “There’s ebbs and flows to any market. Right now the commercial fishermen feel themselves getting squeezed. But boats don’t last forever.”
Maine’s boatbuilding industry received a shot in the arm in 2006 when Governor John Baldacci established the North Star Alliance Initiative, an industry-led effort whose goal was to bring talent and dollars to the coast. In 2007, the NSAI landed a $15 million federal grant to grow and promote boatbuilding in the state.
According to Wellehan, the grant money is to be spent over three years on four “pillars” of economic development: training, research and development, capitalization of facilities, and marketing and outreach. Some of the money is being used to fund scholarships at the Landings School in Kennebunkport and the Boat School in Eastport. The University of Maine’s Advanced Engineered Wood Composites Center received $1.8 million from the grant to act as a research and development hub for developing advanced products that have applications in boatbuilding and other marine industries.
“The fastest-growing part of the trade is composites,” says John Miller, administrator of the Boat School. “Those skills are transferable to so many different industries.”
A strong boatbuilding industry, Wellehan points out, benefits other parts of the economy, including not only composites and R & D, but more traditional industries like lumber, fishing, and tourism. And Maine boatbuilders will benefit collectively from the effort to create an image of Maine as a desirable place to have a boat built. She cites the example of New Zealand, which has approximately three times Maine’s population, and which saw its marine exports grow from $82 million in 1994 to $389 million in 2003, thanks to a combination of marketing and state support.
“New Zealand as a country has put resources into marketing and training,” she says. “We’re trying to market Maine boatbuilders to the world in much the same way. By marketing the state as a whole, everybody benefits.”
Brooklin, population 800, lies on the southeast corner of the Blue Hill peninsula, at the confluence of Eggemoggin Reach and Blue Hill and Jericho Bays. It may boast more boatbuilders per capita than any town in America. The town encompasses several harbors and small coves, strung out along a shoreline dotted with docks and moorings. It’s the home of WoodenBoat and Professional Boats magazines and the WoodenBoat School. And it provides a glimpse of the boatbuilding business in microcosm.
Author E. B. White settled here in the 1930s, and his son Joel established Brooklin Boatyard in 1960. Until his death in 1987, Joel White designed and built wooden boats in the classic plank-on-frame tradition. His son Steve has owned and operated the boatyard since 1986. The yard continues to turn out high-end sailing yachts, including its largest-ever project, a $7.5 million, 90-foot yawl named Bequia, which will be launched in 2009.
“Joel White set the tone for a boatyard; Steve evolved it into cold-molded construction,” says Jonathan Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of WoodenBoat magazine.
“Cold-molding” describes the process of building a boat hull using thin layers of material—in this case, wood—latticed over a frame. The layers are held together by glues that cure at room temperature, a system originally developed for airplane construction in the years following World War II. A cold-molded hull combines light weight with high tensile strength.
“Cold-molded boats are essentially composite boats,” says White. “We’re using lumber as our base instead of fiberglass.”
The late Jimmy Steele, whom Steve White characterizes as “my dad’s best friend,” had a much different approach, becoming famous for his peapod dinghies, handmade of white cedar planking over steam-bent red oak frames. Peter Chase worked at Brooklin Boatyard for two decades, but has recently taken over Steele’s shop, building peapods for Donald Tofias, who purchased the business. “He sells ’em, I build ’em,” says Chase, who still marvels at Steele’s ability to turn out quality boats “all with hand tools, and very few of them.”
Like a surprising number of Maine boatbuilders, Chase grew up out of state—in his case, Connecticut. “My father owned a boat shop that he sold when I was 13,” he says. “My older brothers got to work there, but I didn’t. I never forgave him for selling it.”
Instead, he went to Ireland in his early 20s, and got involved with the restoration of a Galway hooker. The experience gave him a taste for traditional boat construction. “Wood is so much prettier than plastic,” he says. “Ideally, a boat should be biodegradable. If you take care of the boat, it stays in good shape. If you don’t, it’s gone.”
Brion Rieff was likewise drawn to Brooklin by the boatbuilding environment and history. His 12-person shop combines traditional designs with modern materials to turn out elegant, high-performance boats ranging from tenders and runabouts to a 50-foot John Alden schooner launched in 2006, as well as several high-performance sailboats built from his designs. Rieff began sailing on Long Island Sound at the age of 5, and spent many years racing big sailboats before going into boatbuilding.
He came to Maine after “working at every other boatyard between here and Florida,” and usually has two or more projects going at once, including restorations of classic yachts as well as new construction. “It’s a small market, but a very strong market,” he says of the Brooklin boatbuilding scene. “Everybody’s doing something different. I don’t know that any of us have ever competed with one another on jobs.”
Rieff’s boats typically sell in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he admits that his business depends on the willingness of the wealthy to pour money into the water. “If you can afford a Morris or a Hinckley, you can afford a custom-built yacht,” he says. “It’s in the same price range, and you can get exactly the boat you want.”
Atlantic Boats, a few miles away on Flye Point Road, represents a different sector of the industry. Molds for fiberglass lobsterboat hulls of varying sizes lie scattered about the 20-acre property. Hit by the lag in commercial boat construction, the company, created by the merger of Duffy and Duffy and Flye Point Marine in 1996, recently reduced its year-round work force from 45 to 30 employees. But they are finding new markets in smaller pleasure boats and in the international sport fishing market.
“Maybe a third of the boats we’re building now are for sports fishing,” says Hopkins, who, like White, took over the business from his father. “We’re known for traditionally styled boats that are built to be used.”
Atlantic builds between eight and 12 boats a year, ranging from 26 to 50 feet. “We branched off into doing the smaller boats for the pleasure boat market,” Hopkins says. “In the 1990s there was a market for bigger boats, because a lot of money was being made offshore. That lasted through about 2004. Right now fishermen aren’t running out to borrow money for new boats.”
Meanwhile, many of the 60 employees at Brooklin Boatyard are working in and around the open hull of mammoth Bequia, which barely fits inside the main building. The boat, designed by the boatyard, will take 20 months and approximately 85,000 man-hours to finish. For Brooklin Boatyard, at least, projects like the $7.5 million Bequia are central to the business’s survival.
“The rich are getting richer,” White says. “The large boat market is the section of the yachting business that’s growing faster than anything else. We only have a few yards in Maine that can handle really big boats. The yards need to get bigger. We have the craftsmen, we have the skill, and we have the knowledge. We need to spend more time and effort convincing people that Maine is the place to build their boat.”
Sidebar: Boat School Back Afloat
On May 16, 2008, the Phoenix floated.
The student-built Whitehall rowing tender was the first new boat launched at the Boat School in Eastport in five years. It symbolized a turning point for a program with a proud history and, until recently, an uncertain future.
Despite the need for skilled workers at boatyards up and down the Maine Coast, the Boat School nearly foundered in 2007, the victim of state budget cuts. But thanks to Husson College and a local group calling itself the Friends of the Boat School, the ship has righted itself, and stands ready to train the next generation of Maine boatbuilders.
“If you go up and down the coast of Maine, our graduates are in almost every yard,” says school administrator John Miller. “A lot of head guys in yards are graduates of our program.”
The school began in 1969 on the Calais campus of what is now Washington County Community College. Two years later, it was relocated to the old Coast Guard station in Lubec. It has been at its present location on Deep Cove in Eastport since 1978.
In 2007, facing declining enrollment and the loss of several key courses, the legislature severed the school from the community college system and turned the facility over to the city of Eastport. The school was down to a handful of students and had little money to continue. Then Husson stepped in.
This fall, the school will welcome 25 new students into its two-year program. The eventual goal, Miller says, is 100 students, nearly the enrollment the school boasted in 1978 when it moved from Lubec.
Tuition for students from Maine and New Brunswick is $8,000 per year, which includes $1,000 worth of tools that each student gets to keep. Students from other states and provinces pay $12,000. Maine students are eligible for up to $5,000 in scholarship funds through the North Star Alliance Initiative.
Bret Blanchard, a 1979 graduate, has been an instructor at the school since 1984, and has worked for Hinckley Yachts as a drafting and design engineer. “The first year, students focus on wood construction,” he says. “They learn how to problem-solve, how to fix mistakes. They become craftsmen. If they ever have to replace a plank in a boat, they’ve learned how to do that. In the second year, when they get into composites, they already have that level of experience.”
In addition to boatbuilding, the school also offers courses in operating boatyard machinery and small boat handling. A deepwater port launching facility and an adjacent boatyard owned by another instructor provide the school with a real-world boating environment. “It gets you straight ready for working at a yard,” says John Vreeland, a student from Sandwich, Massachusetts.
“The boatbuilding industry is the third largest in the state,” Miller says. “There’s a great demand for skilled workers. In two years, you’re going to have an education that’s going to put you into a great career right here in Maine.”
