About Phil Friedman and For Yacht Builders, Buyers, and Owners

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, and marine operations and business manager.

Admittedly, 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.”

I 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 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 at Edwardsville and the University of Western Ontario at London, 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, 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 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 — a fact for which I am certainly not apologetic, but instead grateful. Just as I am 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 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

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As at April 1, 2024, we’ll be launching 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 just subscribe free indefinitely. Your choice with absolutely no upsell pressure.

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

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

— Phil Friedman, Editor and Publisher

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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.

Beginning April 1, 2024, For Yacht Builders, Buyers, and Owners will officially launch 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 newsletter postings.

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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 founding (paid) subscriber. Until April 1, 2024, you’ll be able to continue sampling free the various sections on our website/hub, to get a feel for what each will deliver on an ongoing basis.

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

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• Access to our Sponsored-Content program for marine sector and related small-businesses. (Contact us for full program details.)
  

Please feel free to contact me personally with any questions or comments you may have about the upcoming 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 © 2024 by Phil Friedman ― All Rights Reserved.

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