The sign at the entrance to the shipyard’s parking lot still says Nichols Bros Boat Builders and the yard is still located at its historical location on Holmes Harbor, at the southern end of Whidbey Island, a large and long island north of Seattle and west of Everett.
For a time, back in the 1960s, six Nichols brothers, three sisters, and both parents all helped build a fledgling waterfront shipyard. Sixty years and dozens of steel and aluminum boats later, the last of the various Nichols brothers, fathers, and uncles who developed and managed the small shipyard has left the business. Matt Nichols, 77, decided to officially retire last June from the company that still bears his family name. But now, for the first time ever, there is nary a Nichols at the yard.
A LITTLE HISTORY
Matt’s family got started in the boatbuilding business when his grandfather, George, moved to Hood River, Ore., during the Depression in the 1930s. One of George’s brothers wanted help building a small pusher tug to move logs on the Columbia River, so George put his blacksmithing skills to work, and they built a small tug called the Whale. Following that, George and his family built more tugs and small, steel fishing boats.
In 1964, one of George’s sons, Frank, struck out on his own and moved his wife and 10 of 11 kids, including Matt, to Freeland, Wash., where they took up residence in an abandoned machine shop at the water’s edge. The property had been in his wife’s family. Frank and family fixed up the shop and temporarily camped out in the back where the floors were dirt, the roof leaked and the windows were covered in plastic.
Matt was 17 when they moved, and he finished his senior year on the island. Back at the yard, he and his brothers worked with their father, building fishing boats.
“Dad was a great teacher,” said Matt. “He really knew how to explain things.”
The market for small, steel salmon fishing boats for Alaska was good, especially following the Alaska earthquake and tidal wave of 1964.
Matt also got the chance to crew on salmon seiners working in Prince William Sound. “After fishing in Alaska for a couple years, I came home with money in my pockets,” he said, “some of which I loaned to dad for his business. Then a few years later, he decided he wanted to retire and told me that I now owned 20 percent of the business because of my loans to him. I had been studying forestry, of all things, in Everett, so I told Cassie, my wife, that I could go back over there and help run this boatyard now that I was a part owner,” which he did. “I think it was one of the best decisions of my life.”
For many years, Matt and his brother Archie owned and operated the yard together. Matt handled sales and administration while Archie was in charge of engineering and production. The yard has always built a large variety of boats. Forty-two-foot seiners evolved into 125' crabbers. Small tugs became big tugs. There was a large and complicated Robert Allan-designed Voith Schneider fireboat for Los Angeles as well as some simple barges. Add in numerous passenger and cruise boats, some large ferry superstructures and a big paddle-wheeler with a working paddle-wheel. And perhaps most of all, high-speed aluminum catamarans.
Of all the different designs built by Nichols Brothers, it’s the high-speed, aluminum catamaran that really put them on the map. It all started, Matt said, when he had been approached by a resort owner on nearby Hood Canal who wanted a high-speed passenger boat to ferry customers to and from Seattle, across Puget Sound. “So he’d gone to Australia on vacation,” said Matt, “and he called me in the middle of the night and said, ‘Get your butt over here, I found it.’”
What he had found were Incat-Crowther-designed passenger catamarans zipping around Sydney harbor. Matt did, indeed, book a trip to Australia, liked what he saw, and cut a deal with Phil Hercus and Incat for a license to build its designs in the U.S. The first boat was bought by Brad Phillips, who accompanied Matt to Australia, for his tourist operations in Alaska. The second boat was bought by the resort owner. “After that we built 55 more catamarans,” said Matt. “They weren’t all Incats, but almost all of them were. They were great designs and simple to build.”
They may have been “simple to build,” but the all-aluminum boats demanded a new kind of construction precision. “It wasn’t like a crab boat superstructure,” said Bryan Nichols, Matt’s son and yard co-president from 1995 to 2005. “There were completely different issues with the metal and how it is welded.” If it wasn’t done right, “the boats could crack apart, so yeah, there was a lot of investment into training and getting it right.”
“We probably had a good 10- to 12-year lead on the rest of the industry,” said Justin Nichols, Bryan’s brother and co-president. “That was nice to be in that pole position. We were the premier aluminum boatbuilder for high-speed catamaran passenger boats.”
X-CRAFT
The vessel Matt is most proud of is the X-Craft, an experimental, high-speed aluminum catamaran built in the early 2000s for the Navy. The 262'x72' vessel was designed by Nigel Gee and Associates in the UK and powered by a combined gas turbine and diesel propulsion system.
“We had built a lot of catamarans at that point but never put in a gas turbine before,” said Matt. “With two GE gas turbines and two 16-cylinder MTU diesels, the X-Craft had 68,000 horsepower. And we never had installed a CODOG (combined diesel and gas) gearbox system before. That was quite a feat to do that. But, you know, it went smooth the whole time even with people doubting us all the way.” Not only did the X-Craft pass muster with the Navy and the Coast Guard, it was also ABS classed.
“Matt has been a great innovator,” said Greg Bombard, owner of three Nichols-built catamarans and CEO of Los Angeles-based Catalina Express. “He’s also thorough, and when he tells you he’s going to do something, he goes and does it. Compliments to him and his crew. They’ve always done a really good job. He was a great shipyard owner.”
Nichols hasn't owned the company since 2007, when the family-owned company went bankrupt following what Matt describes as a “perfect storm” of financial problems that hit them at the same time. The assets were purchased by an investment group and the yard is now owned by Drum Capital Management LLC. Even though Matt was no longer an owner or even CEO, he stayed at the yard as vice president of sales for another 17 years.
Both Matt’s sons credit their father with developing a family atmosphere at the yard. His door was always open. He knew all the names of the men and women who worked at the yard. He helped them out if they needed it. For years, the company has been the largest private employer in Island County. Hundreds of family-wage jobs have helped sustain the local economy for years.
The company has sponsored Little League teams, helped build a local playground, and refurbished a nearby church steeple.
Beyond the island, Matt Nichols’s reputation is similarly solid. “I have never run across anyone who has said that ‘dirty rat bastard’ about Matt,” said Keith Whittemore, former partner and CEO of Kvichak Marine, Seattle. Kvichak and Nichols teamed up on several builds for the San Francisco area. “He was honest, trustworthy, fair, and funny, and that’s a pretty damn good combo.”
He’s also not yet done with boatbuilding. Soon after officially leaving his waterfront office at Nichols Brothers, he started consulting with Snow & Co. in Seattle, opening doors, making introductions, and helping develop marketing strategies.
“He’s always going,” said Bryan. “He’s always on the move.”
