How America Built And Killed The Sportfishing Yacht

Today, the name Hatteras belongs to Bass Pro Shops. The company that launched the fiberglass revolution, that built the first large fiberglass sportfishing yacht ever attempted, that survived Hurricane Carla and proved to the world that a boat made of resin and glass could take anything the Atlantic threw at it, is now a property of White River Marine Group out of Springfield, Missouri. It shares a corporate family with Tracker basse boats and Cabela's. The name Bertram, the brand that proved the deep-V hull in the worst seas the Miami to Nassau race had ever seen, belongs to the Gavio Group, an Italian toll road operator with fourteen hundred kilometers of highway concession in northwestern Italy. An Italian highway company owns the name that Time Magazine once called the Enzo Ferrari of offshore boats. And the custom builders, Rybovich and Merritt, the families who invented the category in the first place, survive as tiny shops in Palm Beach Gardens and Pompano Beach, building fewer than five boats a year for clients willing to spend five to ten million dollars and wait. One company remains. Viking Yachts sits on the Bass River in New Gretna, New Jersey, still owned by the family that founded it in nineteen sixty-four, still employing over eight hundred people, still building convertible sportfishing yachts from forty-six to ninety feet in an eight hundred ten thousand square foot plant. The company builds ninety percent of its components in house, a level of vertical integration almost unheard of in the marine industry. It is the last major American sportfishing yacht builder standing under its original family ownership. The sportfishing yacht is an American invention. The convertible layout. The deep-V hull. The fiberglass construction. The tuna tower. The fighting chair. The outrigger. Every defining element of this vessel was born in American workshops between West Palm Beach and Cape Hatteras in the two decades after the Second World War. America built this category from nothing. Then America killed nearly every company that built it. And the story of how that happened begins with a fisherman grounded by weather in North Carolina, two hundred miles from the ocean, in a town that had never built a boat.