Mike Rybovich takes a critical look at ever-rising costs while questioning redundant gadgetry and excessive overbuilding.
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Nearly every day, some innocent boat groupie asks me what it costs to build one of our boats. With every sincere request, I usually respond by asking a few questions of my own such as how big, how fast, how much equipment, etc. When I eventually get to the numbers, I sheepishly reply with the truth. Sheepishly, because I just have a hard time with what things cost these days. I’ve never been the “Take it or leave it” kind of salesman. I’ve always wanted to treat an inquisitive fan as I would want to be treated. Respectfully and honestly. The problem arises with the honestly part. Predicting the cost of the boat, two, three, four years down the road has become a fool’s errand. I’m sure there are formulas, algorithms, digital modeling and Long Island psychics that might help me to arrive at a somewhat educated guess, but after the last five years of wild west pricing, I am at a loss. Until recently, and as far back as I can remember, we worked exclusively on contract pricing in service and new construction. Today, that business model has become a recipe for big trouble requiring big medicine. How did we get here?
The recent, frightening experiment of global control on the masses played a big part in this fiasco. The entire world jacked up prices on everything, utilizing the perfect scapegoat, a laboratory enhanced virus. Over the last few years, I have had several business associates call me and tell me that I needed to jack our rates up like everyone else. “Where else are they going to go, Mike?” “Holy shit,” I thought. “This is not an oil company or an airline. It’s a boatyard, for Pete’s sake.” Then came the opportunistic increases from our lemming vendors, suppliers, subcontractors and underwriters. OK, Mr. Honest Abe, will you stand on principle and lose your ass, or raise the rates to cover your expenses and become part of the problem? I have heard stories of cost overruns within our industry where the customer ended up paying 50-percent or more than the contract price by the time the project was complete. Around here, discussing our predicament with our customers fell on deaf ears and did not result in any contractual adjustments. I must say, I don’t blame them. When you put a coin in the slot, pull the handle, and the spinning reels come to a stop with three bells lined up, the house loses. We decided the fair thing to do going forward was to go to a cost-plus model and hope the customer would understand, realizing that it is far better to never get started than to start, and wind up in an unpredictable hell hole that is bad for the builder and customer alike. Building and owning a custom boat is not an inalienable right. It is an expensive luxury and a privilege. Like my father used to say: “Michael, no one needs a boat.”
I have records, dating back to the early 1960s, with the labor hours, material costs and risk insurance premiums for most of our boats. To be fair, 60 years ago, custom sportfishing boats were simpler to build and equip. The complexity of today’s boats is a far cry from the practical approach to the fishing boats of 50 to 60 years ago. This extravagance takes significantly more labor and far more expensive machinery to just get a fish to the teaser, but a comparison of what men could accomplish in a day’s work then and now is the primary revelation and a cultural impasse. Humanity’s emphasis is now on image and not output. In the early 1970s, we built two 45s, Frisky Lady and Loot Lam. Each boat had an enclosed deckhouse with a full galley, two staterooms, two heads, flying bridge, tuna tower, twin 903 Cummins, single Westerbeke generator, three station controls, riggers and a chair. Frisky Lady came in right at 10,000 labor hours. Loot Lam came in at 10,500. In 1995, we built a 45, Heaven Lee, essentially the same boat with a soft top, two station controls, and twin 8-92s that came in at 14,500 hours. Building a new Frisky Lady today would require at least 25,000–30,000 hours, depending upon how she is equipped. Conservatively, two to three times the labor than in 1971. Productivity is in peril. The average person, and yes, there are wonderful exceptions, just doesn’t give a damn how much he or she gets done in a day. On top of that, we do a lot of training around here because of the labor shortage. Training is expensive. I can’t, in good conscience, bill the customer full rate for a guy who doesn’t know a Forstner bit from a block plane. I can’t charge the customer for repairing and rebuilding mistakes, yet the benefit package and workers comp insurance on that guy is the same as for our finest craftsmen. This drives the yard overhead up. In the 1970s, there were far more skilled tradesmen in the workforce and even then, John Trumpy told Dad and Johnny he was done. He hung up his scribes and his spoke shave because he was sick of building things four times to get it right. We are way beyond that now.
Let’s be honest. The grinding, fairing and long boarding of all the exterior surfaces is taken to far greater lengths than ever before. In addition to that, we take the unseen and the unnecessary to much higher standards than in the 1970s. Some of this is due to the marketing of specialty epoxy products with fillers added that take more time to apply and add more steps to the paint process. The bilges of today’s boats are stuffed with money. By that, I mean that we take the finished surfaces of things that most people will never see to ridiculous levels of the overdone. Look under the finest automobiles available for purchase today. No one is painting and polishing the frame, leaf springs and suspension in high gloss. No one is hanging mirrors over the differential or mirror-polishing the brake lines. Any impractical behavior like that is specific to hot rod enthusiasts at car shows or lifted truck fools, desperately trying to account for anatomical inadequacies. It’s all for show and in our industry, if you don’t put on the ritz, your work is frowned upon or considered to be of lesser quality. We’re adding labor hours that could be used elsewhere to shorten the build time, and the cost of those specialty primers, fairing compounds and urethane paints increases daily through value-optimized pricing or, what people are willing to pay.
Machinery has advanced with technology and as one would expect, the cost of that machinery has advanced as well. In the early ‘70s we could get a pair of marinized 475HP GM12-71Ns with Allison gears for around $35,000. That was the most diesel horsepower available at the time that would fit under the deckhouse floor. Installed in one of our 53- to 56-foot hulls, we could cruise at around 21 knots and run at 24 to 25 knots on the pins. These days, we can get 2,600 horsepower from the marine diesel Holy Grail, the MTU 16V2000 M96L, at $1,600,000 a pair, with ZF gears. Installed in one of our 78- to 86-foot hulls, we can cruise at 35 knots and run at 40 to 46 knots WOT. Everyone wants to go fast, so everyone has to have that engine. That engine also increases in price, every year without fail, through the same value-optimized pricing scheme. In the 1970’s, one generator was sufficient. 12.5 to 15 kW was enough to handle the load of the basic equipment aboard. Then we decided we needed a backup in case we lost the lone genset. Now, instead of knowing one’s boat and managing one’s power, less than inspired crews have decided we need to install seamless transfer technology between ship and shore and run two generators in parallel to automatically balance the load requirements for all the crap they think they require to go fishing. More switching and secret razzmatazz circuitry costs a lot more money. This has pushed the cost of the simple old light plant off the charts. Stabilization gyros, sonars, bow thrusters, pressurized livewells and pump boxes, cockpit and bridge air conditioning, glorified bilge shop vacs, and on and on, are adding millions to the cost of sport fishing as time goes on. It’s akin to hiking the Appalachian Trail with a climate-controlled suit in zero-gravity boots. What’s the point?
It ain’t just boats, folks. My first truck, a 1967 Ford F-100 cost me $1,900. Three years ago, I bought a 2022 F-150 for $59,000. That’s over 30 times what my ’67 short-bed cost. I realize that advances in expensive technology eventually become standard equipment. I also realize that without an improbable shift in cultural norms, human productivity will continue to decline while the payroll will continue to increase. The spiral is infinite and the cost of everything will forever rise accordingly. The price of a home, a boat, a beer and even a kiss, will be more tomorrow than today. How much more? It’s “Whatever the market will bear.” John Fogerty figuratively asked: “Who will stop the rain?” Obviously, not me or anyone else in this industry, so I’ll leave you with this: Drink up, hold on tight, and kiss her while you can, boys. That new one is going to cost you more than you think, but man she sure can dance! So, what are you willing to pay?
This article originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
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