MAINEBOATS,HOMES HARBORS&MAY 2015 • ISSUE 134

Sardine Nightsand Red Sox on the Radio

Making it in Maine

Bellamy Eagles ✯ Ready for Rhubarb? ✯ Rowing to Canada

Ditching corporate life to buya boatyard, and LOVING IT!

(Top) Late summer and fall are busy times at the yard as more than 200 boatsare hauled out and stored. (Bottom) Come spring the process is reversed asthe yard’s crew prepares to step a mast as part of the relaunching process.

DRIVE INTO THE YARD at Great Island Boat Yard inJanuary and you might think the place has closed forthe winter. Snow is piled up around the yard’s seven

big metal storage sheds; floats from the four T-docks that nor-mally bustle with boats in the summer are neatly stacked onland; and grey ice covers nearby Orrs Cove.

Don’t be fooled by this calm exterior, though. Boatyardslike Great Island, which stores 220 boats and refits another 15or 20 a year, are busiest in the boating off-season. Step insideany one of these efficient, industrial buildings, and you willfind people hard at work.

Maine’s stellar reputation for new boat construction gets

the limelight. But it is all-purpose yards like Great Island withtheir capacity for service, repairs, and refits that are the back-bone of the state’s maritime industry today.

Since Steve and Stephanie Rowe bought the 70-year-oldHarpswell yard in 2005, they have grown Great Island from asmall marina with mostly maintenance and storage to a rap-idly growing business offering substantial refitting, painting,refinishing, rigging, installing and upgrading electronics andother systems, repairing wood or fiberglass hulls, even rebuild-ing hulls and renovating yacht interiors.

After spending years as engineers at General Electric, thetwo understand how to organize complex jobs and have intro-

REPRINTED with permission of MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS 19

A YARDF O R A L L S E A S O N S

Great Island builds a reputation for refits and serviceBY POLLY SALTONSTALL

Great Island Boat Yard, seen here from the water, has built a niche for its refit work.

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duced cutting-edge systems to increaseefficiency and improve customer service.Engineers down the road at the muchlarger General Dynamics Bath Iron-works might possibly learn a thing ortwo from the Rowes.

Steve Rowe said he has conscien-tiously focused on refits and repairwork,along with storage and maintenance,because he sees that as a sustainablelong-run model.

Rather than going from one or twomajor new boat projects to the next andalways wondering where the next jobwill come from, Great Island does 15 to20 refit projects a year, ranging from$75,000 to $600,000 for boats between35-70 feet long, according to Steve. Thisspreads the load and means that no oneproject will make or break the business.An added advantage is that with a steadystream of interesting work, the yard cankeep skilled technicians busy andengaged, he added. The Rowes have 35employees.

“Coming from GE where the powerturbine business was always boom orbust, I didn’t want that,” said Steve.

Steve, who has a business degreefrom Duke University, worked for Gen-

eral Electric for 14 years, first as an engi-neer at big power plants and then asmanager of the company’s environmen-tal services division. Stephanie alsoworked for GE, first as an engineer atpower plants and then in marketing.They have two sons, ages 8 and 11 and

live just down the road from the yard.They left their high-powered corpo-

rate jobs and moved to Maine becauseinstead of operating behind the scenes ata huge corporation, they wanted tointeract with customers and know they

were making a difference in people’slives.

“We wanted to do something wherewe could make people happy,” Steve said.

The heart of the operation is an airy,open post-and-beam structure thathouses the business office, the store, anda customer welcome area. There fromhis stand-up desk overlooking OrrsCove, Steve keeps track of hundreds ofcustomers and their boat plans.Stephanie does just about everythingelse, including personnel, finances, andrecord keeping.

The yard’s busy season starts aroundLabor Day as the crew begins haulingboats, a process that lasts until the end ofNovember. During that time, the Rowesand their team do annual service workon storage yachts—changing oil and fil-ters etc.—and put together work plansfor customers.

“We do a ton of estimates during thistime. We also are developing refit proj-ects,” Steve said. “Our goal is by Decem-ber 31 to have work-defined estimates inthe system.”

While the Maine winter howls out-side in January, February, and earlyMarch, workers in the yard’s big sheds

They left their high-powered corporate jobs

and moved to Mainebecause instead of

operating behind thescenes at a huge

corporation, they wantedto interact with customers

and know they weremaking a difference in

people’s lives.

Great Island’s crew includes three riggers who maintain, repair, and upgrade rigging and spars stored at the yard.

20 MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS | APRIL / MAY 2015 | Issue 134

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are getting boats ready for launching,which begins April 1. Launching seasonis the most stressful time.

“I tell the crew the most importantday is the day the customer arrives andsteps on the boat. If it’s perfect, they’llcome back. If not, they won’t,” said Steve.

The summer season may actually bethe yard’s slowest time.

A chunk of the yard’s business comesfrom its relationship with BruckmannYachts and Grand Banks Yachts as a des-ignated commissioning, warranty, andservice yard. Additional areas of special-ty are refits on Little Harbor yachts andoffshore cruising sailboats; this is due inpart to the expertise of the yard’s threeriggers. Anyone planning to sail long dis-tances at sea needs to know their rig hasbeen carefully inspected and maintained,Steve noted.

Walking through the sheds is likenavigating through a maze. Big motorcruisers on stands share space with sail-boats, packed in carefully, almost but notquite touching. A new 20,000-square-foot building built last year increased theyard’s total storage capacity to 60,000

square feet. And every inch is filled. “Refits are gangbusters right now,”

said Steve. He has three older HinckleyTalarias in for various projects rangingfrom a new interior to new systems andteak decks, for example. A 1947 Alden

ketch in another bay is getting a newcenterboard trunk and rudder. That’sjust the tip of the iceberg. One huge bayis set up just for spray painting.

Steve is justifiably proud of the sys-tems the couple have put in place, rang-

Soon after the Rowes bought the yard a main building burned. They replaced it with an energy-efficienttimber-frame structure built in 2009 by Houses & Barns by John Libby.

ing from the use of iPads by service tech-nicians to keep track of work on boats,complete with photos—replacing theprevious paper trail between workmen,managers, and owners—to extremelycareful, upfront work estimates.

“During a refit, we spend 40 to 60hours up front digging through a boat toput together an estimate. We do notwant the customers to have any surpris-es,” he said.

Even the smallest detail matters here.A handout in the customer lounge fea-tures photos of all the employees, listingtheir name and job—just in case a cus-tomer cannot remember the name of theperson working on his or her boat.

As Great Island’s reputation hasgrown, the yard has drawn customersfrom up and down the eastern seaboard.A quarter of the company’s winter stor-age business is boats that spend theirsummers out of state and belong to out-of-staters, according to Steve.

The couple bought the business afterfour years of looking at yards from Vir-ginia to Maine. Steve grew up in New

York State where his family ran a smallski resort. Stephanie comes from a largeGreek family. They wanted a businessthat they could run as a family andwhere they could interact directly withcustomers.

Running a yard like this takes a lot of

work, but the Rowes love it. At the endof a day of meeting with happy cus-tomers, they know they are in the rightbusiness.

Polly Saltonstall is editor in chief of this mag-

azine.

22 MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS | APRIL / MAY 2015 | Issue 134

Stephanie and Steve Rowe, here with their sons Keegan and Gavin, bought Great Island Boat Yardbecause they wanted a business they could run as a family.

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