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Boat builders try to keep art afloat

EAST BOOTHBAY, Maine — For four centuries Mainers have turned trees into boats, creating an industry that epitomizes the state’s hard-working, sea-faring sense of itself. But now Maine has a problem with boats: Not enough people want to build them.

Boat builders, accordingly, have resorted to the once unthinkable. They’re trying to educate Maine’s youth about a craft that’s supposedly synonymous with their Pine Tree State. And they’re hiring workers “from away.”

In coastal boatyards — that’s “boatyahds” — the Down East accent increasingly competes with the intonations of the Gulf Coast, the Pacific Northwest and the border states.

Larkin Hall, a Louisville native who worked in south Florida for 20 years, always dreamed of living in Maine. Last month, the boat builder got his wish, joining Washburn and Doughty, a yard that could make more tugboats if it could find more workers.

“There’s fewer people going into this,” Hall says of boat building. “It’s tough for the industry, but it’s worked out well for me.”

Skilled boat- and shipyard workers are in short supply across the nation. But nowhere is the demand more acute than in Maine, whose boatyards market themselves as repositories of skills and attitudes handed down from worker to worker since colonial times.

A survey this year for Maine Built Boats, an industry group established in 2005 to strengthen Maine’s boat building industry, found that almost every boatyard needed workers, including carpenters, welders and joiners. Some have had to use agencies to bring in contract workers from places such as Louisiana and Florida.

“With the history of our industry, you’d think our kids’d be saying, ‘Gee, I want to build boats.’ But you don’t hear that,” complains John Kashmar of Wilbur Yachts in Southwest Harbor.

Matt Maddox, Washburn and Doughty’s human resources director, also wishes he could hire more Mainers. “We haven’t had much luck recruiting, even in the vocational schools,” he says. “The skilled people we need are not in this area.”

Disappearing acts

Why don’t more Mainers want to build boats? Builders and industry experts cite these factors:

å An aging workforce. Maine is one of the oldest states in the nation. The average age of boatyard workers is in the mid 40s; at Washburn and Doughty, the average welder is 55.

å An ignorance about boat building. Many boatyards are located on coastal peninsulas, far from the cities and suburbs of southern Maine.

Stacey Palmer, a staffer with the Maine Marine Trades Association, attended a high school trade fair in the city of Lewiston last month. She says none of the 100 students she encountered had ever been to a boatyard.

“We’re like the place you drive past every day on your way to work, but don’t notice,” says Susan Swanton, Palmer’s boss.

And what Mainers think they do know about boat building often isn’t positive, she says. However romantic or picturesque a boatyard might seem to tourists, many Mainers regard the work as dirty, dangerous and seasonal.

å A disdain for blue-collar work. Boat builders say efforts to broaden Maine high school students’ educational horizons have hurt the skilled trades.

High schools tend to steer clever students to college; State Education Commissioner Susan Gendron has even proposed requiring every senior to apply to college to be eligible for a diploma.

“There’s been a generational shift,” says Maddox of Washburn and Doughty. “The emphasis is on white-collar desk jobs, not blue-collar jobs. There’s an embarrassment with getting your hands dirty.”

Joel Pelletier, a shop teacher at Bucksport High School, says graduates would rather go into logging, which he describes as more dangerous than boat building, or take clerical jobs “with not a lot of skill involved.”

Many school districts have de-emphasized industrial arts programs, which develop the skills boat builders need. “People have this mentality that everyone has to go a four-year college, and it’s killing the trades,” Pelletier says. “I literally have an industry knocking at my door. ... We’ve got to fight the guidance counselors over this.”

Revising perceptions

In the popular imagination, Maine is one vast boatyard, where everyone has built, is building or could build his or her own craft. So telling Maine about boats might seem like telling Newcastle about coal.

But to keep their industry growing, boat builders say they must let young people know that boatyards offer a chance to earn decent wages ($12 to $24 an hour) and benefits in a beautiful area while doing challenging work under decent conditions.

The state has received a $15 million federal economic development grant to bolster the industry, some of which will be spent to train workers in the latest ways to use fiberglass and composite materials.

Maine manufacturing in general is slumping. But fueled by a strong demand for custom-built sailing yachts and powerboats, the state’s boat builders have added several hundreds of jobs and about $19 million in annual wages since 2000.

To spread the word, boat builders say they must go into schools and bring schools into the yard. Maggie Zieg, human resources manager at Hodgdon Yachts here, talks about hosting elementary school field trips.

There’d be some wide eyes: The yard is working on a 96-foot sailing yacht; the pilot house for a tugboat; and a prototype vessel designed for use by Navy commandos.

“This is no longer a cottage industry. This is not about building old-fashioned boats your grandfather would have built,” says Tim Hodgdon, whose family’s business dates to 1816. “It requires sophisticated, high-tech talents. With computers and advanced composite construction, it’s more like aerospace construction.”

Meanwhile, workers from away continue to arrive. Next month, Mike Clark starts at Hodgdon’s as a draftsman. His last job was in an architectural firm; he’s never worked in a boatyard before; and he’s from Colorado.

He’ll join outsiders like Jeff Carmichael, who came from Seattle. “The production work out there wasn’t as interesting to me,” he says. “I was attracted to custom work they do here. I didn’t want to build the same thing over and over.”