An oyster work boat under construction at Fogg’s Boat Works in North Yarmouth.
Flower Boat Works, Walpole
Recently they finished one of Jeremy Beal’s former race boats off as a cruiser for a customer from Connecticut. Jeremy sold MARIA’S NIGHTMARE II (Wayne Beal 32, 1,000-hp Isotta) and it was shipped to Walpole, minus her engine. They repowered her with a Cummins 6.7 QSB 450-hp diesel. They modified the top by adding some length. For accommodations they put in a V-berth and an enclosed head and galley. They changed the exhaust, hydraulics, and wiring. They were really pleased with how the boat went. They said at 18 knots she burned just six gallons an hour. They delivered her to Portland cruising at 24 knots saying it felt like driving a skiff she is so light.
In the main work bay, they have a Flowers 43 pleasure cruiser, which they are doing some upgrades to. They have the engine out and are polyfairing the entire engine room and then they will Awlgrip the engine bay. They have added an anchor locker, and they changed her layout from a mid-level galley into a double bunk with chart table. Down forward she has an island queen berth, a huge master head with a walk-in shower, an electrical locker, and a double berth. Up in the shelter is a steering console, L-shaped settee, and galley. She also sports a floating deck with air intake under the deck, a retractable swim platform, bow and stern thrusters and joystick function.
In the bay next to the 43 is a Mussel Ridge 28, which is being finished out as a race boat for Gary Genthner of Round Pond. The hull was finished out light, and they are now building her top. As for power, it was thought she would get a real big gasoline engine.
After these they have a Flower 38, which needs some upgrading. She had been finished with Seaboard, and this will be stripped out and replaced with wood. They will then repaint the interior. The owner has a long list of upgrades, which, coupled with the other projects, will keep them busy this winter.
There are a couple of other small repair jobs and then they will be building a new Flower 30.
Flower also has the moulds for the 23 Seaway, 22 Sisu, 27 Sisu, 25 T. Jason, 30 South Shore and in the Flower line the 33, 38 and 43. The 43 has also been stretched to 46.
Fogg Boat Works, North Yarmouth
There are two boats in their new shop. One is a new 28-footer, which is being finished out as sort of a landing craft with a flat angled bow. She is being built as an oyster boat for a company on Nantucket. Patrick Fogg, who runs the shop, is her designer. He said, “She is a big workboat. It has a modified V-hull and a nice big open platform with side cutouts. The pilothouse is pretty basic, with just simple systems, like GPS and VHF, but no radar. The cutouts in the bulwarks are for loading on their 4 x 4 cages. We are building a davit, which is an easy way to get the cages on board. We have a large main hatch in the deck that the fuel tanks can come in and out of and it gives you access to the bilge pumps. There is also sort of a rail system that you slide the tanks on. The fuel tank holds 90 gallons. She will be powered with a 200-hp Yamaha outboard.”
They started this project at the end of July, and they have just a month left before she is done. Patrick thought there was about a week left on the metal work and another week for wiring and she will be out the door.
Next to her is BLACK BEAR, which is an aluminum research vessel owned by the University of Maine. She is in to have her bottom replaced due to electrolysis. Patrick said, “We have completely gutted it, tore off all the bottom plating and are now re-plating the entire bottom. We basically had to cut out all the decks, as it was full of foam and that had to be removed. Welding with that stuff behind it would not be good. We’ve got a ways to go, but all the bottom plates are on.”
Plating the bottom became easy when they were able to call the boat’s maker, Specmar, Inc. of St. Helens, Oregon and get the CAD files for the plating. Those files were sent to a company, which cut all the plates and sent them back on a pallet. They still have the chine plates to do and then they need to weld on the inside and put back in all the systems. She came in last February and they felt they would not be totally finished until the end of winter or early spring.
Before this they did a 16-foot electric skiff for a lobster co-op in Spruce Head with the assistance of the Island Institute. Patrick designed the boat and powered her with an E-Propulsion system. This was followed by 16-foot Downeast launch for a customer on North Haven, who has an oyster farm. Then last July they launched a 27-foot Downeast styled picnic boat that went out to Peaks Island.
Patrick has built an impressive company taking over for his father, who is semi-retired. He spent two-years at The Boat School in Eastport and went right to work with his father, who had built several aluminum boats starting in the early 2000s. Patrick said that he uses a lot of the principles he was taught at The Boat School. He added, “It’s all completely different here now. When I started working with my father I had my hand in a number of the early builds. I picked up the welding as we went. Back then everything was patterns, whereas now it is all done in CAD. We do it all in 3D and send out the files, have it cut and it comes back in a kit.”
Building aluminum boats has been mostly a West Coast endeavour, but it is gaining popularity on the East Coast. Patrick felt that it is going to gain even more popularity. Beyond what he is working on in the shop he has at least a couple of leads on new builds this winter. He has also started doing more fabrication work, which helps keep a flow of billable work coming through the door. He has even done some prototypes for military contractors.
General Marine, Biddeford
They have developed a new model based on their very popular General Marine 26 inboard model. Stacey explained, “From the waterline up it’s the old inboard 26 and from the bottom down it’s a brand-new hull design. It is basically a deep V midships (22½ degrees) with a warped plane going towards the transom and it drops down to 12 degrees at the transom. The premise for this hull design was that it would have the ride of a deep V. We also wanted something that had the lateral stability of the Downeast boats. That is something our customers really gravitated towards in the pleasure boat market. That is why we only went with 12 degrees at the transom. So, it’s kind of a unique design where the plane is warped like that and there’s a trick to doing it and we accomplished that. The goal was to have a boat that does 20 to 25 knots in most sea conditions, get good fuel economy and has good lateral stability. We have got really good sales and people love the boat.”
They started on this design back in 2020 and in four and a half months they had a base boat with an outboard mounted on and doing sea trials. They tested this for a year and a half making sure that she would do everything they wanted her to do, because Stacey felt that this may be his last new model. They also kept it quiet as they did not want people to know, because once they know they will drive you crazy for one. When they were satisfied with how she ran, they put a finish on the hull, changed the shear and some minor other details, and built a new hull mould for this model. Building moulds is almost cost prohibitive. The hours it takes to build a plug, make it absolutely perfect, and get the mould off of it takes hundreds of hours at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.
The first new 26, the prototype, was launched in 2022 and they are now on hull #5. They have several different models. There is the secret centre console model, which they do not talk about. Many of the moulds used for their General Marine 22, were purposely built larger so they could be used in the 26. The foredeck mould they have they can use for the center pilothouse or the center console model. The first model to be released was the centre pilothouse and they made a temporary mould for the pilothouse to see if this was viable market. They were able to get three parts out of that, but now they are building a new plug and getting ready to build a new mould for it. The cabin boat, which has V-berths, galley and head is a much more intense build. One always hopes that you could use some of the existing moulds from the General Marine 26 inboard, but they needed to be modified. The only one that really worked was the deck and house mould.
As for the Northern Bay 36, Stacey has lent them to Chislet Marine in Dover to be built there. He said, “I sent it down to Cameron (Chislet). I felt incredibly guilty having those molds and people coming in and wanting one of them and I just don’t have the time or the crew. Those builds are a year, year and a half, are very complex and you tend to burn out at the end. The last two or three months of the build the whole crew can’t wait until that boat is gone. For me, they are not as much fun to build as the 26s. The 26s have the right amount of time in them. That is why we went back to them.”
The Hinckley Co., Manset
There is always a lot going on here. They have just razed the building that housed the Ship’s Store and will replace it with a 27,000-square foot heated storage building. It will also house a rigging shop and mast storage. They have broken ground and were doing site work getting ready for pouring the concrete.
They have been doing a lot of maintenance. This included painting the inside of the mechanical building, where they ground the floors and applied an epoxy coating. The main building received a new roof. Several other buildings on site were also getting various upgrades.
As for new boats, they already have their new 39 model, which was at the Newport International Boat Show in September, under construction at their Trenton facility. This is also offered as an outboard model, which makes it into a 41. The new 45 is under construction, but the first one is not yet complete.
Spring was very busy getting all the storage customers ready for the new season. In one of the shops is the custom Hinckley 61 GOLDEN ARGOSY, built in the early 1990s. She is undergoing a major refit, which includes painting the hull and decks, replacing the teak decks, interior modifications, and systems upgrades. The owners have owned this boat for most of her life and are making sure she is in perfect shape so they can pass it on to their children.
Most summers there are transients that come in needing some amount of work and this year was no different. However, they also had four boats that found underwater obstructions. Two of them were simple repair jobs, but two were not. They will need to have their keels removed along with some of the interior joiner work so they can make the necessary fiberglass repairs around the top of the keel.
Other work includes four teak deck jobs. The winter schedule is shaping up to be a busy one.
