The Maine boat builder

US-based BackCove and Sabre yachts, part of the same company, are built in the North Eastern state of Maine, about two hours from Boston. Maine, with its established boat building history has been home to Sabre Yachts since 1970, making this year its 40th anniversary.

The company was strictly sail from 1970 until 1991 when it built its first Sabre power boat. It wasn’t until 2003 that Back Cove Yachts was formed, which is dedicated fully to the power boat side of the business.

Back Cove employs about 75 people, while Sabre has 105 staff.

“Each brand builds parts for each other. For example, we’ll build wood components at Sabre and ship them to the Back Cove yard. At Back Cove we do fibreglass parts and ship them to the Sabre yard,” said VP of sales and marketing Bentley Collins.

“All up we’re running about 180 people and are hiring back up cautiously ... in the past three months we’ve hired 40 people. But we are being cautious, we don’t want to hire these people and let them go again, but we’re feeling very good about it,” he said.

Today, 90 per cent of the business is power motor yachts, and Back Coves out number Sabres by about two to three.

Both brands are manufactured in Maine, in different factories, and both cater for a different market. Sabre is considered the more “prestigious” of the two brands while the Back Cove, although still offering that characteristic lobster boat stlye, offers more of an an affordable boat.

“The unique thing about the two brands is that Sabre is what we call stick built, so you build a fibreglass hull, put a floor in it and put stick built furniture on top of it. Everything is glassed to the hulls like traditional boat building. While Back Cove has interior fibreglass units or IGUs and its more of a assembly process than  a semi-custom process. Sabre is all twin engine applications and Backcove is all single engine.  So they are distinct in that sense. Backcove is lower maintenance, lower operating costs, lower price. Sabre is more luxurious, more custom built, more of the little wood working details,” he said.

US market

Collins said the US market is picking up for anyone who is willing to build new boat models.

“If you’re still building old models in the US, you’re in trouble. That’s one thing that our company has done, for the past 17 years that I’ve been there, is build a new model a year, every year. This year we will build three new ones because the market really devastated the old range.

The company has a new 30 footer in the back cove range, and in Sabre, a new 40 foot fly bridge and a new 46.

“The market in the states is very much technology orientated and if you can offer someone a story, they will buy it. What it comes down to with our Sabre product is we have Zuess drives and IPS drives and people are buying that technology. And at Backcove, just a single engine bow thruster, the economy of a boat like this is what it’s about. With fuel prices going up people are becoming very aware of how much it costs to operate their boats,” said Collins.

While the American market in some extreme parts was down as much as 60 per cent, Collns said Backcove was down about  20 per cent, and Sabre, about 28 per cent. Collins said the company managed better than most because it anticipated the downturn and ensured its dealer inventories were down.

“We spent a tonne of money ensuring our dealer inventories were down. We managed to push the old inventory out. That’s all gone now and we are in much better shape starting up a again. The dealerships are still hurting and they have slowed their orders, but that’s okay with us because we know that having too much dealer inventory in the field, is only going to hurt us, so we’ve been carefully managing our inventories and not pushing too much out there.”

Australian market

“From what I hear this market has been less impacted, I’ve studied the figures and this has certainly been less impacted than the US market,” said Collins.

According to Collins the company’s Australian distributor, Jed Elderkin from Sydney’s EMarine, sold 22 boats here in the past
four years.

“That was better than we thought, and this year, he will be our number one dealer worldwide,” said Collins.

“While some of our American dealers suffered collapse, he kept on ordering and selling boats. We worked hard, we made concessions to make sure things kept going for him, since he was a small independent business.

“Jed worked extremely hard and stayed focused exclusively on the brand. I think the more exclusive the dealers are, the better we do. If someone has four or five brands to sell, most people gravitate to the cheapest brand,” said Collins.

The future

Collins said he sees growth in single engine boats for a market now more focused on economy and value for money, than unrealistic bigger boat ambitions.   

“We have a story to tell here about the fuel efficiency and reliability of these single engine operations,” he said.  

“It’s certainly the trend in America – buying smaller because of fuel costs, maintenance, docking, etc. The single engine phenomena is certainly a growing market and a lot of people haven’t recognised it yet because it’s not a big enough market sector. I think that fuel efficiency and low cost of operation is a significant part of our business.”