CREDIT: Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun Lance Bracewell owns >Bracewell Marine group in Richmond that is currently building a $6-million US yacht for Fox Sports.

The real absurdity of Gilligan’s Island, the iconic 1960s TV comedy re-packaged on TBS this season as a reality show among competing castaways, is what was blueblood Thurston Howell III doing on a tub like the S.S. Minnow anyway?

If his ship had really come in, Howell, like today’s multi-millionaires, would be looking for a fabulous gin barge far beyond a boat with a cramped quarters and a tiny head like the Minnow.

The search for luxury befitting his station in life would begin in Florida at the annual Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, the mecca of the industry. There, every October, an armada of high-end B.C. yacht builders exhibit their craft to tempt potentates, playboys and corporation presidents into a look that sets them apart from the crowd for the long, yacht summer.

Reflecting the happy-days-are-here-again climate for the well-heeled under the administration of George Bush, some B.C. boatbuilders have their order books full, keeping up with the demand. Favourable tax treatment by Uncle Sam allows owners to declare their vessels as a second home or a business expense. And tax loopholes permit some big-boat captains to deduct all their expenses — from moorage costs to fishfinders.

For a certain level of American yacht owner, exchange rates and currency differences aren’t a big consideration. They want a sense of exclusivity in their big-ticket purchases, which is why Ben Vermeulen’s boatyard on River Road in Delta has continued to steam ahead in an industry where others have dipped below the waterline.

In the past five years, a number of the province’s custom yacht builders have gone under because of production problems, lawsuits and the strengthening Canadian dollar, lessening the buy-in-B.C. appeal for American buyers looking to strike a bargain.

West Bay SonShip — Vermeulen’s company — has been able to weather the storm and prosper because of its reputation. A marriage of high-tech and old-world craftsmanship, West Bay has fashioned an exalted niche among picky customers based on its core values of quality and honesty.

“We appeal to a market that is not just looking for a lower price,” says president Wes Vermeulen, Ben’s son. “At the end of the day, they know we’ll be here to support the product. We treat our customers like they’re extended family and they stick with us when they go looking for a bigger boat. They know they’re not dealing with a huge corporation doing multiple boats.”

Ben Vermeulen, a Dutch immigrant who came to Canada in 1959 and walked the streets of North Vancouver looking for work, started with nothing, except a pair of skilled hands, an entrepreneurial spirit and a genius for looking at a piece of carpentry or machinery and knowing instinctively how it all fits together.

Trained as a goldsmith in Holland, he found work with a wrought-iron fabricator soon after arriving in Canada. He did so well in the heavy metal business that Vermeulen started a small steel company in Burnaby, bidding on transmission line contracts for power dams.

In 1967, at the urging of an employee who loved boats, Vermeulen launched West Bay Boat Builders, even though he had never been a boater, much less owned one or built one before.

“We started from a business point of view, but it takes a passion to do this kind of work,” Vermeulen says. “It’s a labour of love. I have other hobbies, but my main hobby is still this business. The biggest blessing we hope to get out of this is to pass the business on to our kids.”

Wes, the company president, Bas (short for Sebastian, VP of design and production) and daughter Rochelle Vermeulen (interior design), are all main players in the company, along with daughter-in-law Lynda and son-in-law Danny, manager of the engineering department.

Ben Vermeulen, who is 70 but fitter-looking than the proverbial 60-year-old Swede, began with an abandoned fishing shed and a patch of swampy land on the banks of the Fraser that he rehabilitated, load by load, with fill and a wheelbarrow. Initially, West Bay stayed afloat by building fishing trawlers, water taxis, log salvage boats and doing repair work before taking a leap of faith into pleasure craft. Today, the company has nine acres of production space and is looking to acquire more, and has 300 employees working two shifts to turn out luxury motor yachts that make a statement. The statement is that you have to be very rich to own one.

West Bay’s most popular boats range from 58 to 103 feet, hand-crafted in fibreglass and exotic woods from African Wenge to Carpathian Elm, and sell for between $2 million and $9 million US, although options can push the cost much higher. (One customer, for instance, required inlaid diamonds in his shower surround). The company recently introduced its latest model, a 50-foot “entry level” boat that sells for $1.2 million US. The new design appeals to West Bay owners who might want to down-size, although the norm in the industry is to step up to ever increasing lengths of conspicuous consumption.

In the not too distant past, 80 feet was considered the threshold of true yachtdom. However, when Microsoft owner Paul Allen pulled into Cannes last year with the 414-foot-long Octopus, complete with helicopter launching pad, personal submarine, speedboat, swimming pool, music studio and basketball court, it signalled a new race between boys with the biggest toys. Hypercompetitive Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took up the challenge, told his designer to set stretch out the blueprints, and launched a 460-foot boat in the fall, the Rising Sun. Alas, the latter is about be eclipsed by the Prince of Dubai. His sumptuous, 525-foot vessel being built in the Middle East is immeasurably grander and 40-foot longer than a Royal Navy destroyer.

By comparison, some of the largest personal power yachts plying Canada’s west coast are Jim Pattison’s 150-foot, Louisiana-built Nova Spirit, which he used to entertain ex-presidents, prime ministers and premiers before it caught fire last September; the 125-foot luxury yacht Taconite, built in Vancouver in 1930 for Bill Boeing of passenger aircraft fame; and the 115-foot Hotei, launched in 1986 and used as the royal yacht to transport the Prince of Wales and Diana at the opening of Expo 86. All are about to be overshadowed by the new giant on Burrard Inlet — a 220-230-foot power boat under construction in North Vancouver for Dennis Washington of the Washington Marine Group.

Hotei was built at the venerable McQueen’s shipyard on the Fraser River. The company doesn’t really concern itself with newspaper publicity or the Canadian market.

“We do almost all our business in the U.S.,” says Doug McQueen, a second-generation boat builder. “I don’t want to say anything about our company.”

“The yacht building business in B.C. isn’t very media-savvy,” says Peter Robson, editor of Pacific Yachting magazine. “We really should be hearing a lot more about them.”

Not only is custom yacht building in B.C. an exclusive industry, it’s a secretive one. According to the British Columbia Yacht Building Association, formed in 2004, there are upwards of 1,500 employees working in the industry, generating from $150-$200 million US in annual sales. Since 90 per cent of production is going stateside, though, there isn’t a need to make waves and play to a Canadian market.

West Bay, for instance, has sales offices in Seattle, Newport Beach, Calif., and Fort Lauderdale, but none in Canada besides the head office at 8296 River Road. One of the company’s new 50-footers will be available for viewing at a False Creek marina during an invite-only open house. The company said the open house would not be affected by the labour dispute which has been threatening the Vancouver International Boat Show at B.C. Place, which was due to begin Wednesday.

“Historically, our customer base is the U.S., up until a month ago when we introduced the 50-footer,” says West Bay CEO Glenn Wong. “They’ve had a West Bay before, and then they come back for a bigger boat. We have one customer who is on his third West Bay in three years. He’s from New York and he’ll keep the boat in Florida.”

Wong has been building brands and markets around the world for 20 years as an executive with Electronic Arts Canada, Rogers Cable, B.C. Hot House and Nabob Foods. He came on board nine months ago to help ease the operational transition from one generation of Vermeulens to another. West Bay has ambitious plans to double production and sales by 2010 and build a 125-footer (the company’s biggest yacht to date is 110 feet).

With big pocketbooks, strong personalities and accompanying idiosyncrasies, West Bay‘s customer base is drawn from well-to-do entrepreneurs looking to announce their arrival in the leisure class, executives of Fortune 500 companies or those from the film industry. They have scads of discretionary income and demand discretion from their builder. In the U.S., Tiger Woods launched a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Christiansen Yachts of Seattle, his boat builder, after the company broke a confidentiality agreement and publicized its involvement with the golfer.

Not surprisingly, West Bay is very reluctant to divulge its client list, except to say that nearly all have been previous boat owners who definitely know what they want. And what today’s yacht owner wants is a boat loaded with high-end appliances, technology (plasma-screen TVs), toys (wine coolers, pianos), artwork and beautiful cabinetry, which West Bay crafts in its woodworking shop.

“It reflects their taste, their design, the special things that they want,” Wong says. “They’re the kind of people who don’t need to drive a Ferrari to impress anybody. The boat becomes an expression of the lifestyle they want.”

The Vermeulens‘ personal yacht, a 107-footer, has five staterooms with en suite heads to accommodate family and grandchildren, and crew quarters for four.

Nonetheless, the norm in the B.C. industry is that boat builders don’t get rich catering to the wealthy.

Lance Bracewell, the 51-year-old owner of Bracewell Marine Group near Shelter Island in Richmond, is a benchwork and joinery graduate of BCIT, drives a Pontiac Grand Am and makes the daily commute to work from his home in Abbotsford.

“You do it more for the pride of making a boat,” says Bracewell, who employs about 50 skilled workers at his yard. “Contrary to what people might think, we don’t operate on huge [profit] margins. It’s about three to five per cent. We don’t have thousands of people knocking on our doors for the type of product we build.”

Bracewell will have the 54-foot Pacesetter and the 62-foot Secret Cove moored at the False Creek Yacht Club this week as part of the floating component of the Vancouver Boat Show to interest Canadian buyers, many of whom jet in from Alberta. “Why not show these boats and see what happens?” he says. “There’s a lot of [Alberta] money coming out to the coast.”

Bracewell’s American profile is expected to get a substantial boost when a steel-hulled, $4 million US sportsfisher is launched later this year. Under construction at Bracewell’s Richmond yard, the boat, designed by noted marine architect Patrick Bray of White Rock, is to be featured weekly in the Fox Sports Television show Inside Fishing, recreating the oceanic travels of Zane Grey. A prolific writer of 60 Western novels (Riders of the Purple Sage, among others), Grey, who died in 1939, was also was a great storyteller of fishing adventures.

“We shopped this boat from Louisiana to Seattle to Brazil,” says the show’s executive producer, Michael Fowlkes. “Lance just impressed us with his craftsmanship and the fact everything is under one roof. We’re projecting a launch in late summer or early fall of this year, which is just phenomenal, since he didn’t start laying the keel until August of last year.”

Unquestionably, the province’s top specialized aluminum yacht-building shipyard is ABD Aluminum Yachts, under Second Narrows Bridge in North Vancouver. Aluminum may have a bad rap because of the province’s high-speed fast ferry fiasco, but for yachtsmen seeking a long-range, around-the-world experience, it’s the way to go. For $11 million US [what it takes to put a 120-footer in the water), the owner not only gets a boat that can withstand rough seas but one that is rust-free and elegant — the decks, wheelhouse and galley are laid with teak and holly; the all-metal hull and superstructure are finished off with all-grip paint and gleam like porcelain. An aluminum yacht can go from Vancouver to Hawaii on a 16,000-gallon fuel tank or sail from Vancouver through the Panama Canal to waiting buyers in Florida and the Caribbean, rather than being shipped by freighter as in the case of a fibreglass boat.

Al Dawson, who founded ABD in 1987 with partner Burton Drody, started his working life as a 13-year-old apprentice joiner in a furniture company. He studied the marriage of aluminum and boatbuilding at Matsumoto Shipyards — which occupied the Dollarton waterfront of North Vancouver for 40 years — before it closed its doors. He is 80 now, but like the material he uses, Dawson shows no sign of gathering rust.

Around the shipyard almost seven days a week, he has neither the time nor the inclination to own a yacht.

Says Dawson, “I go out in my canoe or my kayak 10 times a year, and that’s all the boating I need.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005