Topsides on a sportfisherman are prepped for painting at J&J Marine Fabricating Inc.'s full-service yard in Somerset, Massachusetts.

It's the first entirely new boatyard to be permitted in the Bay State (Massachusetts) in 27 years. And it's a first class, full service operation, having reclaimed a forsaken industrial site that frightened away any previous prospective buyers. Welcome to J&J Marine.

When Steve Anderson first looked at the derelict seven acre Parks Shellac Co. facility in Somerset, Massachusetts, its inventory included three dead skunks, four dead foxes, 40 dead cats, 1,800 drums (each 55 gal/208 l) of mystery liquids, innumerable roof leaks, and a 300 year history of mixed industrial use that made chemical contamination a virtual certainty. Not surprisingly, the property had been on the market for five years without a bite. Anderson recalled, "I walked up to the building and said, 'This'll be perfect.'"

A boatyard, generally speaking, is an easy thing to identify. Even the name as it appears in a business directory usually leaves little doubt that it refers to anything but a boatyard. J&J Marine Fabricating Inc. is an exception. At first read, it sounds like a custom metal shop, and that's what it has chiefly been for the past 16 years as it evolved from a startup in a Swansea, Massachusetts, garage to a boatyard tenant on Cape Cod. Now, in spite of its name, and the slim chance any would be boatyard has of finding a good waterfront site these days, J&J has transformed itself and some forsaken industrial acreage on the Taunton River into a major new service yard for the southern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut boating market - the first entirely new boatyard to be permitted in the Bay State in 27 years.

But before we can appreciate the details of the yard, it's important to understand just how unlikely such a new venture is. Boatyards are a finite resource. Realities of economy, geography, topography, navigation, and politics mean there are few sites where they can be successfully located especially on the long-settled Eastern Seaboard. Consequently, such places are recycled. So, even if ownership and management have changed over the decades, many boatyards are still located on properties that have been boatyards for generations. Conversely, new yards like J&J, on newly permitted sites, are rare to the point of freakishness. When it comes to developing waterfront property, boatyards just can't compete with residential opportunities. From the ditches and backwaters of Florida to the tidal flats of Maine, even previously marginal waterfront properties are in demand. Navigable waters, necessary for a working boatyard, are at an absolute premium. In this overheated real estate market, even such industry royalty as the storied Rybovich Spencer yard in Palm Beach, Florida, couldn't hold out. Sold in 2004, the 12 acre facility will now be home to 220 condominium units in two high-rise buildings, along with a restaurant, marina and a drastically downsized boatyard. The good news is the yard hasn't been entirely displaced, and by all reports the quality of work there hasn't suffered. But from an industry perspective, it's sobering that by adhering to the investment developers' bottom line, a legendary brand like Rybovich can so easily be reduced to a virtual sideshow in its own yard.

A drive through New England's equally hyperactive coastal real estate market makes it hard to believe there's any place an hour from Boston and Cape Cod, or 16 miles up the Taunton River from Newport, Rhode Island, where a new yard could possibly find the sort of foot-hold Steve Anderson said his company secured.

Leona Roach, executive director of the Massachusetts Marine Trades Association, said the recent trend for marine service businesses in her state has been to locate away from the coast. While there hasn't been a discernible drop in the 1,260 marine trade businesses in the state, she said many, including boat storage and service, have moved inland as former working waterfronts are converted to residential development. Meanwhile, state and federal permits required to maintain or expand existing yards have become more difficult to obtain. Roach said the permitting process for a new application is "incredibly daunting," and added that she could think of only one new marina forget a full-service boatyard that wasn't reusing an existing site, getting permitted in the state since 1985. And it wasn't J&J.

New pilings along the yard's Taunton River waterfront are the beginning of a system of docks that will provide slips for 100 boats.

So, even though Anderson, his partner, Jeff Botelho, and a couple of reliable industry sources had all assured me this operation was legit, my expectations weren't high. At the yard gates at the beginning of Somerset's Main Street I saw a site dominated by crumbling two story brick and stone industrial buildings and rusted fence. The only wonder was that Anderson and Botelho were so determined to create a new boatyard from scratch that they'd see opportunity in such a desperate place. Inside the gates, though, is a different world. The old shellac factory is in fact a bright, open space with skylights, new floors, and smartly trimmed facades on the various shop areas and ample offices. But the first thing I noticed on the 98°F/36°C day when I showed up was that the entire 74,000sqft (6,875m²) facility was mercifully air-conditioned. Not just the offices, but also the numerous shops where the work is done. Those include a bustling canvas shop, a wood shop, fiberglass cutting and laminating spaces, a sprawling tower and hard-top fabrication area, two paint booths, covered repair bays, a well-stocked parts warehouse, and a small machine shop. Old beams are painted white, and old concrete floors cleaned and sealed with epoxy paint. Machinery, tools, equipment, and work surfaces are clean, and almost uniformly new. From the water side, the yard's buildings sport new walls and siding and sliding doors. A new Travelift, bulkhead, and docks define the actual waterfront. A new Cabo and a Hinckley were being serviced at the pier as we walked by. My reservations quickly dissolved. Anderson had chosen strategically where to make his initial investments, and they weren't in window dressing. It was obvious that this was a serious stab at a new full-service facility.

J&J founder Jeff Botelho's commercial start was mostly in building stainless steel cabinetry for U.S. Navy submarines; he stepped up the civilian side of his business in the wake of a hurricane in the early 1990s. After a move to the so-called South Shore town of Marion, Massachusetts, where his reputation for quality canvas work and towers for sportfishing boats grew, he moved J&J again, to quarters at MacDougall's yard in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. Steve Anderson entered the picture in '98, when he asked Botelho to build a new tower for his own boat. Anderson, a recently retired but still relatively young construction contractor, saw that J&J had grown too big for Botelho. "He was overwhelmed with trying to run the company, complete the projects, and get everything else done," Anderson said. J&J needed more space and resources to do what customers were asking for, in addition to metal and canvas work. It needed to be an independent boatyard, not a tenant business. After some discussion, Anderson came on board as a partner.

Like so many New England boys, Anderson had grown up messing around in a local boatyard. In his case it was Webb Wallace's yard in Merrimac, Massachusetts, that whetted his appetite for boats and the boatyard business. He recalled, "When I was 21 I told myself, 'I want to own a boatyard.'" Though he deferred the dream during his years building houses, he did keep his hand in, rebuilding classic powerboats Mackenzies, Lymans, and the latest, a 1929 Robinson Seagull triple cockpit runabout he bought when he was 16. So for Anderson, joining J&J was a decision to pursue his passion more seriously in what has become a second business career. Anderson: "The first thing I said was, 'We need a real shop.'" While Botelho ran the business, Anderson scoured the Massachusetts coast from Falmouth to Fairhaven for property that could be a boatyard. His search ranged from existing marinas and lots in marine industrial areas, to a former Oldsmobile dealershipeven a couple of acres in New Bedford, sandwiched between an antiques dealer and a former Revereware factory. Working with regional business development agencies, he spent two years hunting, sometimes subjecting properties to purchase and sales agreements just to let the owners know he was serious about his boatyard quest.

When Anderson finally found the old Parks plant in Somerset, he couldn't get any banks to help with financing. "They looked at it and laughed. They said, 'That place can't be sold. It's contaminated,'" he recalled. Indeed, the bankers' belief was well founded.

Somerset, Massachusetts, is an old industrial town located in the shadows of the neighboring, larger, aging industrial city of Fall River. A stretch of bright river runs between them. Historically, that river was Somerset's reason for being. An 1887 etching of the town proudly shows smoke belching factories, and fleets of cargo schooners along its waterfront. Anderson said the earliest known use of the site was as a shipyard in 1642; local rumor has it that some of the stone buildings at river's edge were munitions dumps during the Revolutionary War.

By the 1800s the property was occupied by Old Colony Ironworks, manufacturer of shovels and nails for the transcontinental railway. That all burned in the late 1870s, only to be replaced by another foundry, Anderson said. In all, the site's ironworks years left about a foot of slag over the entire property. By the time Prohibition ended, there were, in addition, the remains of a single cylinder steam engine and a barge burned intentionally on the shoreand an illicit still in a chimney's brickwork. But these weren't the environmental scares that had repelled potential buyers in 2000. Parks Shellac Co. bought the property in the early 1900s, subsequently producing and storing a variety of paint products and solvents there until closing its doors in 1999. Anderson said there were 79 storage tankssome as large as 44,000 gallons (166,558 l) that had contained, among other solvents, acetone, thinner, kerosene, and toluene. It appeared to be an environmental nightmare that would require millions of dollars to clean up. Those fears would have to be put to rest before Anderson could get outside financing for improvements at the old factory.

He hired environmental consultants to test the site. They drilled 330 wells Anderson said. Although there and test borings, including some remained signs of the detritus of its past use through the buildings' floors, the sale went through. "Everything turned out to be relatively clean."

Dominating this view of J&J from its waterfront are the yard's 84ton Travelift, the specially designed slipway and bulkhead, and the service building that can accommodate the big lift with a boat in slings.

Local politics presented the next impediment: some residents objected to the reuse of the Parks site for a boatyard, even though the property was already subject to industrial zoning. Anderson had to pay for an appraisal of the proposed yard's impact on the entire town. He said the town meeting where the fate of the yard was decided had the second largest turnout in Somerset history. Voters approved J&J's project by a solid majority. On April 12, 2001, reclamation began in earnest with the backing of a bank and the Massachusetts Office of Business Development. Anderson said trucks hauled away 84 dumpsters full of rubbish, each dumpster having a 30cuyd (23m³) capacity. Most of the mysterious 55gallon drums turned out to contain latex paint, which was easily disposed of. Failing flat roofs and pyramidal skylights were repaired, windows replaced, walls moved or removed, floors shot-blasted clean of decades of oil, shellac, and paint. An entire section of the existing main building was swallowed up by a new metal structure that was to become J&J's metal fabrication shop. "We used the inner building as the staging for the new one." Anderson said. Only when the new structure was complete did they remove the old. With the shell finished, interior structures and systems were next. Utilities and facilities were sized to meet the needs of a full-service yacht yard. There's 1,600amp, 480V, 3phase electricity stepped down at 12 separate transformers to meet the needs of different tools and shops. The metal fabrication shop alone requires 800 amps for welding. Anderson said J&J spends about $500,000 on electricity in a year. In addition, high pressure gas mains feed the huge furnaces, airconditioners, and compressors. Cables for computer networks and Internet access, and wires for security cameras and alarms, run throughout the buildings. By August, high volume air filters had been installed in the fiberglass grinding and layup room. A state-of-theart 125,000cuft (3,540m³) paint booth, which alone cost about $1.5 million, was under way (see sidebar below); and the dock, with a similar price tag and about 100 slips, had been started. Anderson showed me a problem he'd run into at the waterfront. A 5 knot cross current in the Taunton River made negotiating vessels into the Travelift more like landing an airplane on a short runway. Anderson said boat drivers had to come in fast to avoid being swept into the pilings, but they had to stop fast too, fetching up on the slings of the lift before hitting the riverbank. Now, a series of deep, baffled floats reduces the current in the launching slip and approach. Anderson is reluctant to go into specifics on the floats' construction, except to say that development of the system of baffles was done with models in a bathtub before the fullsized floats were built. As for the Travelift, "We put in the biggest one the bank would agree to," Anderson said of the new 84ton model capable of accommodating a 23' (7m) beam. J&J then built the new service building with doors tall enough and wide enough to drive the loaded lift inside. Outside, there's space for storing about 150 boats, Anderson said. By the summer of '06, $7 million had been invested in the sitewith additional investments still to be made. J&J is betting heavily on the profitability of taking care of boats: cleaning, storing, rebuilding, repowering, refitting, finishing, and more. Where does this confidence come from? Anderson said he and Botelho simply perceived a demand in the southern New England market for a full-service yard where the company, not subcontractors, would offer most essential services. A yard where work quality could be controlled and clients get what they want done without dealing with unknown "outside" entities. J&J wasn't able to offer that as a tower and canvas shop renting space in someone else's yard. "We deal with a clientele who are very involved with their boats," Anderson said. "Long gone are the days when an owner says, 'Here's $25,000. Wash it, service it, and have it in the water next spring.'" A full-service yard today must have the capacity to rebuild an interior, install new engines, or add a new tower over the winter, if that's what a client desires. J&J is up to any of those tasks.

Head fabricator Alan Bouchard assembles the components of a new tuna tower. Bouchard runs pipe through a bending machine with deceptive ease.

For all its growth, J&J's origins still show. The tower shop is the most impressive space in the yard. It's like a giant garage with 35' (10.6m) ceilings that can accommodate boats for tower and T-top installations. On the day I visited, a hurricane damaged GradyWhite, getting fitted with a new T-top, looked tiny in the cavernous space. In the adjoining fabrication area, tower and T-top components are shaped and assembled. Head fabricator Alan Bouchard had laid out the frame for a Cabo hardtop on an expansive low table crowded with cryptic marks and notes measurements for a range of tops and tower frames. Components were tack-welded as the piece began to take three-dimensional shape. J&J towers and tops have a fined down look that stands out among the competition. The yard's towers are more than merely serviceable platforms; there's attention to aesthetics that offshore anglers have come to expect. "Now they want it all up there, but they don't want it to look like there's anything holding it up," said yard service manager Chris MacDougall. That spare look carries through to the T-tops and hardtops as well, where supporting legs are turned in to the sides of the bridge, instead of landing down on the deck, and custom curves complement the sheer and shape of each boat. One testament to the qualities that characterize a J&J fabrication: a functional but visibly graceless tower, sitting discarded in the outside storage area; its owner wanted J&J to build him one to the yard's design. Another indicator of the widening recognition of J&J's fabrication work is the list of boat builders and dealers who frequently turn to the yard for tops and towers, among them Cabo, Regulator, Hatteras, Alden, Sabre, and Back Cove. The tower shop employs five workers full time.

Custom towers are what J&J Marine Fabricating first made its name doing. Here, a new tower takes shape on the floor of the metal shop.

This custom tower includes a foam-cored composite hardtop and console parts also made at the yard.

Fiberglass layup crew members Jose Pereira and Ron Oldfield, making hardtops. Those panels, cored with 5lb (2.3kg) Corecell foam, fit between aluminum carlins preshaped to the camber of the vacuum bagging table.

J&J's dualbay Dustron booth takes the curse off grinding FRP parts, and serves as an air filter for the entire fiberglass layup room.

An essential companion to that shop is the fiberglass layup room, devoted chiefly to the production of hardtops and other fiberglass components for towers. The room's size isn't impressive compared to builders' shops where whole hulls and decks are molded. What is remarkable, though, is its cleanliness and the lack of dust and fumes. That's essential, since the layup room ended up in the middle of the renovated Parks building. Looking at the floor plan, it would be easy to predict that much of the building, including the employee lounge, might reek of resin. A large Dustron booth from Filter 1 (Garland, Texas) is the key to the clean work environment, according to Anderson. The threesided workspace is fitted with two banks of 24 filters each that pull air from the entire larger room. Grinding on particular pieces is done in that booth, and dust really doesn't have a chance to get into the broader shop. Outside the booth is a cambered infusion table, where the hardtops are laid up and vacuumbagged.

At its new yard, cushions and upholstery have been added to the service menu as well. and curved aluminum carlins, which also serve as electrical chases, are sandwiched between skins of 1.5oz/sqft (450g/m²) mat and 1808 unidirectional cloth. Once pulled from the table, the rough tops are ground and then fitted with frame attachment points and electrical runs. J&J makes a practice of recessing running lights unobtrusively in the forward corners of its tops. The composite parts are finished in the small adjacent paint booth, before they're joined with a metal tower or T-top frame.

Canvas shop manager Tom Coutts, center, oversees Erick Corrigan, left, and Jeff Cutler in the fabrication and installation of custom enclosures that incorporate clear plastic, another specialty offered by the early iteration of J&J as a business entity.

The canvas shop was the first J&J service to move to the new yard, in late 2002. It is a large, low room with broad tables surmounted with scissors, zippers, patterns, and industrial sewing machines. Tom Coutts runs the crew of three producing canvas enclosures for many of the towers and tops built in the metal shop. The results are precisely fitted enclosures often made with large clear panels of EZ2CY (see Professional BoatBuilder No. 101, page 39). An essential part of the canvas shop is the pattern room, which serves like the measurements that tailors keep of individual customers. "No two boats are alike," Anderson said. "No two enclosures are alike." So templates are filed of every panel of every job. That makes it easier to replace pieces from afar, if, say, a panel blows overboard crossing the Gulf Stream.

In addition to enclosures, the shop makes custom cushions and offers upholstering. These products and services are what J&J secured its reputation on, well before the advent of the Somerset yard. But the same bag of tricks isn't necessarily enough to keep a business thriving. "When new boats don't sell, there aren't new towers on them," Anderson said, explaining the practical limitations of J&J's formerly circumscribed scope. By contrast, the full-service yard he and Botelho are creating has the flexibility to adjust to evolving economic realities providing service, storage, repairs, and retrofits when new boat and new tower sales are slow. The expansion also springs from client requests to have more of their service work done in one place. Service manager MacDougall noted that the yard's reputation for towers is often the lure that brings in boat owners who subsequently stay for a new engine or paint job.

Left Cutler installs fasteners on a side panel. Right Al Carpentier keeps track of hardware in J&J's wellappointed stockroom.

LeftBob Cabral glues edge trim on a custom table in J&J's woodshop. RightThis finished entertainment console now graces the saloon of a 53' (16m) Ocean motoryacht.

Those added services now include a well-appointed wood shop, where joiner work for remodeled interiors is done. Anderson, who once ran an architectural millwork shop making reproductions for historic houses, is right at home there. He said one of J&J's most common jobs is cabin sole replacement. The yard specializes in soles of plywood panels that are easily removed and reinstalled to allow for future repairs or changes in the bilges. The shop installs the panels on a layer of neoprene foam backing, which helps with sound deadening. The wood shop isn't exclusively for interiors, either. Anderson said he's looking forward to heading up a team to completely restore a 1969 wooden Chris Craft in 2007. The greatest change J&J has made to the original Parks plant is the addition of the Travelift compatible steel building that houses two service bays and the big paint booth. With fulllength sliding doors, the steel structure built on the footprint of a section of the old plant dominates J&J's shorefront elevation. Engineered to withstand 185mph (298kmh) gusts, the building can shelter a halfdozen yachts in the 50' (15.2m) range for service at one time. During my visit, a large Alden powerboat was having a new windshield and side panels installed on its flying bridge, while across the floor, a 53' (16m) Ocean motoryacht was in for substantial interior remodeling. The shop felt almost empty.

Jason Carreiro polishes a new table under the mezzaninea work and staging area for boats being serviced in the spacious bays in the background.

A portion of the original structure forms a mezzanine over an open shop full of workbenches, tools, and machinery for work on whatever project boats are in the service bays. Lighting is strong throughout the work area, and heating units promise winter comfort in addition to the airconditioning that kept it bearable in August. Anderson said the buildings were shot with 4.5" (114mm) foam insulation for an Rvalue of 30.

J&J is already a working yard, but it's a work in progress, too. Another phase of development is just getting under way. Behind the service bays and mezzanine is a section of the original brick structure where restoration had just begun in August. Anderson walked through the crumbling rooms with an optimist's eye. This will be office space rented out to marine related enterprises, he explained: a financial group, insurance company, documentation company, marine surveyor. "Those are the types of businesses we're trying to attract," Anderson said. And then it was on to the really grim old pre-Revolution stone buildings, with gaping holes in a roof that dates from the 1800s. J&J's plans show this building attractively restored, with shop fronts for marine trades on the first floor, and offices above.

In the final phase of development at J&J's Somerset site, these buildings, some of which predate the American Revolution, will be renovated to house retail space, a restaurant, and apartments.

Anderson said there will also be a restaurant in the old building, and three apartments upstairs to accommodate boat owners or guests. While that sounds a bit like the thin edge of the residential and retail wedge working its way into the yard, this is a far cry from the 'condominium and private dock' development that might otherwise have been built here. "I could have taken this site and made one hundred percent more money than I ever make in my best estimates on the boatyard," said Anderson, speaking as the retired contractor and developer. "That's where this site was headed." In the development course J&J chose to pursue, the restaurants, shops, and offices play secondary roles to the boatyard, but they are there, an acknowledgment of the contemporary pressures that challenge the traditional service yard and a diversified hedge against any future softening of the marine sector. PBB

Computerized modules control humidity, pressure, and temperature in J&J's new $1.5 million paint booth. Another control module regulates supplied air for individuals working in hoods in the spray booth.

J&J crew member Mike Ervin checks measurements for a soon to be sprayed boot top.

At J&J the booth is held at 0.5 lb/ sq ft (2.4 kg/m²) of pressure when it's in use. By driving more air in than is removed via exhaust fans, the atmosphere in the room can be kept at a higher pressure than ambient conditions outside. This is achieved by coordinating speeds of the air exhaust and intake fans through a computerized control panelthe same panel that's also regulating temperature and humidity. In addition to the controlled atmosphere, good lighting is essential in a booth where painters are striving for consistent, flawless coverage. J&J's booth is illuminated by 672 individual light bulbs, all in fixtures under sealed glass. Should any glass be broken, power is automatically cut to the entire booth, reducing the possibility of a fire sparked by a blown bulb or electrical short. Given all the technical finetuning the booth permits, there still must be someone who knows how to manipulate it, and actually apply paint to the boat. "Neither of us is a painter," Anderson said of himself and J&J founding partner Jeff Botelho, who oversees most yard operations. Skilled staff was essential to making the paint booth pay, so they hired experienced painters Michael Ervin and Peter Conary to run the shop. Between January and October last year, 15 boats were painted at J&J. That's fewer than the boateverytwoweeks pace Anderson would like to keep, but for a new offering it's not bad. He's still hesitant to label it a glowing business success, and observed that there's plenty of competition from other wellequipped paint shops in the region. And, that the area's boating economy is a bit slow right now. Looking at this pricey, stateoftheart booth from the perspective of the entire yard, Anderson said, "It opened up a whole new avenue to do more work." It brings in clients for a paint job, who then often stay for additional services. As for those predictable queries from boat owners about services the yard doesn't have, paint, Anderson is pleased to report, is off the list. "Now they want indoor storage," he said. And laughed. Aaron Porter

About the Author: Aaron Porter is associate editor of Professional BoatBuilder.