About Phil Friedman and For Yacht Builders, Buyers, and Owners (FYBBO)

Hi, I’m Phil Friedman, boating enthusiast, boatbuilder, marine industry consultant, and the creator of FYBBO.

For nearly four decades, I’ve traveled the environs of the recreational marine industry, carrying a “portable boatyard” around in my head — as a yacht designer, boatbuilder, shipyard superintendent, marine operations and business manager, and a yachting writer and editor.

During my career in the recreational marine industry, I’ve not exactly followed a great circle course. And to be sure, I’ve experienced a few groundings along the way. But — and this is the essential point — never once during a span of more than thirty years have I ever regretted making the decision to pursue a career “messing about with boats.”

My romance with boating began during my teenage years in the 1960s, when two friends and I converted a World War II surplus life raft to a small outboard-powered boat with a canvas cuddy and attempted a west-to-east crossing of Lake Michigan.

The voyage, if you can call it that, was frustrated by high winds and seas and ended with us blundering into the offshore firing range of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center during one of its shelling sessions and being towed unceremoniously to the base by the Coast Guard.

Not exactly an auspicious beginning for a nautical career. But it did lay the seeds of an ongoing fascination with boats and boating.

After a hiatus that included college at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago and graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as a few years of teaching philosophy at the University of Southern Illinois (Edwardsville, IL) and the University of Western Ontario at London, Canada, my earlier fascination with boats and boating returned with a vengeance.

I did a six-week cruise in a 14-foot Star Craft fiberglass center-console model that I had custom-rigged for boat camping on the then newly-formed Lake Powell in Utah. At that time, the lake which had backed up behind Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River in Arizona, was only at about 25% of its eventual total depth. So, the canyon walls were effectively more than three times as high (above the water) as they are now. And I spent six weeks exploring the those canyons all the way from Wahweap, AZ to Bullfrog, UT (95 miles north by water), and eventually to Hite, UT (which is at the top of the lake).

When I returned to the world of academic philosophy, I began reading and studying everything I could get my hands on concerning the elements of yacht design, as well as the practices and procedures of boatbuilding. Later, I completed a program of study in yacht design, and even went so far as to study basic structural engineering and strength of materials. The sum total was the beginning of the “portable boatyard” that I’ve carried around in my head right up to this day.

My marine industry career started in earnest on the Lake Erie shore, where for a couple of years in the early 1970s I managed a small full-service marina and boatyard, hauling and blocking boats for winter storage with some of the most rudimentary (read “crudest”) equipment known to man. That was when and where I developed a real-world grounding in maintenance and repair, and where I became one of the first people in the industry to utilize linear polyurethanes by contracting for yacht painting with Imron before DuPont officially acknowledged boat painting as a possible application for that particular coatings product.

There then followed a four-year stint as a teaching master at Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology in Toronto, where I wrote the curriculum for and coordinated a two-year post-secondary program in boatbuilding and recreational marine industry management training. At the same time, I designed and built boats and produced, for more than eight years, a monthly column on boatbuilding, repair, and maintenance, for the two major Canadian yachting publications of the day.

In the early 1980s, I sailed down to Florida, where I eventually became VP-Operations and CFO for a multi-location Hatteras/Bertram dealership and chain of three boatyards on the Gulf Coast. And after several years of live-aboard sailing and cruising, my wife and I settled in Fort Lauderdale, where I became the Senior Editor of Power & Motoryacht magazine and concurrently established a yacht industry consulting and project management practice.

Eventually one of my clients, for whom I was supervising the design and construction of a fast 120-footer, acquired Palmer Johnson Yachts in Sturgeon Bay, WI and Savannah, GA, and recruited me to run the company. Which I did, as president and CEO from 2000 until 2004, thereby gaining the opportunity to supervise the construction of more than a dozen luxury yachts in the 30- to 50-meter range.

Eventually, I returned to consulting and writing, and I worked through a series of projects that included the prototype construction for a line of high-performance air-cushion catamaran motor yachts; the ship fitting of a high-performance 50-meter composite military patrol vessel (in which I planned and managed the first-ever installation in an FRP hull of Hamilton’s HM1000 water-jet drives, at more than 26,000 pounds each); and the design and fabrication of ultra-lightweight cabinetry and furniture for a series of weight-sensitive military hovercraft.

More recently, I’ve completed long-term consulting gigs for the reorganization and expansion of service operations for a Midwestern full-service boatyard, spent time in Taiwan building a semi-custom 80-footer for a client, and directed manufacturing operations during a turnaround effort at a well-known builder of performance cruising sailboats.

My work history in the marine industry has been eclectic, to say the least. But it’s a fact for which I am not apologetic. Indeed, it’s one for which I’m grateful. Just as I am grateful for the “portable boatyard” I built and still carry around.

Last but certainly not least, I’m pleased these days to have the opportunity to share some of the experience I’ve gained and to pass on some of what I’ve learned along the way. I hope you will join me on this latest leg of my personal voyage.

— Phil Friedman, Editor and Publisher, FYBBO

Why subscribe to For Yacht Builders, Buyers, and Owners?

Subscribing gives you full access to the FYBBO newsletter and to our website/central hub, which includes a large and growing library of previously published articles and which offers an array of auxiliary discussion forums and other services.

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By subscribing, you won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your email inbox, and you have ongoing access via our website/publishing hub.

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By subscribing, you become part of a community of yachting and boating enthusiasts and recreational marine industry professionals who share your passion for yacht and boat building, yachts and boats, and yachting and boating.

Enjoy access to our DIY Forum section

Subscribing also affords you access to discussions by professional and DIY builders and re-fitters, who share their knowledge and experience to the mutual benefit of our subscribers and the members of our community.

Get professional consultation and advice for your project(s) via our
Pro Advisor section, at discounted member rates

We accomplish this mostly via one-on-one and conference Zoom video calls. And it’s very much like having your own professional yachtbuilding and refit consultant or project manager on-call to help you with specific issues and/or point you to where you can obtain further expert information and professionally competent help.

Keep in mind that a Standard subscription is completely FREE. And you can always unsubscribe, with just a click, at any time.

Subscribe

In April of 2024, we launched an expanded multi-tiered paid-subscription program that offers a range of added special services for our community of enthusiasts. Our Standard subscription, however, remains free. So, you can try before you buy or, if you prefer, just subscribe free indefinitely. Your choice with absolutely no up-sell pressure.

Whatever form of subscription you choose, I look forward to welcoming you aboard.

— Phil Friedman, Editor and Publisher

For more details on the new tiered subscription program, scroll down further.

You're Invited to Upgrade to a Premium Paid Subscription

WE'VE ADDED A RANGE OF PREMIUM SERVICES FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS. (NOTE THAT NON-PAYING SUBSCRIBERS WILL CONTINUE, AS BEFORE, TO RECEIVE AND BE ABLE TO READ OUR MONTHLY NEWSLETTER EDITIONS. YOUR CHOICE, EITHER WAY — NO PRESSURE WHATSOEVER.

Beginning April 1, 2024, For Yacht Builders, Buyers, and Owners officially launched an expanded range of sections and auxiliary marine-related premium-subscription services. All of our present 15,000+ free-subscribers are invited to consider upgrading to the premium services available with our new paid subscriptions. However, rest assured that, even if you choose not to upgrade, you will continue to receive and be able to read our free blog postings.

We’ve set up this new tiered subscription system because 1) we value you as a reader and subscriber, whether or not you are paying. And 2) we believe that setting up the subscription system in this way, let’s you determine for yourself how best to take advantage of what we offer here on our publishing hub and website.

Below, you will find a breakdown of what will be available to you as a standard (free) subscriber vs a premium (paid) subscriber vs a sustaining (paid) subscriber.

Here is what’s included at each subscription tier:

• Assures access to all new blog posts at publication, delivered directly to your email inbox and to an archive of previous free blog posts.

• Unlocks access to our group Chat, Notes,Travel Forum, and Product Review sections.

• Opens up membership in our community of yachting and boating enthusiasts and industry professionals.

• Includes everything provided in the Standard Subscription plus:

• Opens access to our Marine Master Classes section, where we host a variety of educational courses and both audio and video podcasts. Most of these are at no additional charge, but in some cases, we my levy a modest additional charge, primarily to limit registration numbers to workable levels.

• Opens access to our full Archive section (including a growing number of long-form feature articles by Phil Friedman, previously published on For Yacht Builders, Buyers, and Owners, major boating and yachting print magazines, various digital magazines, web sites, and platforms).

• This is the Premium Level subscription at a discounted price (12 months for $37 — a nearly 50% discount — when paid on an annual basis) , plus:

• Opens up access to, and the ability to participate, in our DIY — Q&A Forum and the ongoing discussions found there.

• Opens up the ability to initiate threads (start topic-specific discussions) in the group Chat.

• Everything included in the Standard and Premium level subscriptions plus:

• Opens access to our Pro Advisor consulting services at special discounted rates.

• Opens access to our Marine Business Blog section, where we publish insider information and expert advice concerning the recreational marine industry and marine operations and business management.

• Unlocks access to our Sponsored-Content program for marine sector and related small-businesses. (Contact us for the complete details of our current program.)
  

Please feel free to contact me personally with any questions or comments you may have about the tiered subscription program. You can reach me at: phil@portroyalgroup.com.

I look forward to seeing you on the inside and, if you are not already a subscriber/member, to welcoming you to our community.

— Phil Friedman, Editor and Publisher, FYBBO

Copyright © 2025 by Phil Friedman ― All Rights Reserved.