In the world of yachting, one of the greatest feelings is taking delivery of your new (or new-to-you) vessel. All your dreaming has come to fruition, you step onboard, feel the wheel in your hands, the deck under your feet, and the sun on your face. The possibilities are endless.
Then, a few weeks later, you’re out cruising, and you hear a tick that doesn’t sound right. Or you wrap up the season and realize you need to do some routine maintenance. This is where yacht ownership can go from idyllic experience to nightmare scenario. That is, of course, unless you have the right service partner.
At Lyman-Morse, we maintain and care for some of the finest yachts afloat—classic or modern, power or sail, big or, well, slightly less big—for a wide array of discerning owners, captains, and fleet managers. And this isn’t some coincidence—we service the best boats because we provide the best service.
“We’ve done a really good job of building a team that puts us on a different level,” says Eric Beckman, manager of our Thomaston-based service division. “We work with some of the best captains, owners, and fleet managers in the industry, and the reason they keep coming back is not only the quality of the work we perform, but it’s also the culture that we’ve developed here. We don’t separate our clients from our crew. Typically, if a customer is coming by to check out their boat, our crew doesn’t need to clear out and get off the boat. Our customers expect to see the crew working on the boat. They look forward to catching up. Some of our clients have built personal relationships with some of guys on the team—they go fishing together, they go hunting together. We try not to treat the work we do as a business transaction; we make it personal for everybody.”
We know that it takes more than a warm smile and a handshake to make a lifelong customer. That helps, sure, but if the quality of the work isn’t there, then you’re just a friend, not a client. And to provide the best service, you need to employ the best people. “We have a lot of guys who have been here for their entire or career, or most of it, they’re seasoned pros and the best around,” Beckman says. “We get guys from The Landing School, the International Yacht Restoration School, the Great Lakes Book Building School, all those places. But we’ve also managed to take guys from outside the industry and train them into high-quality technicians.”
Another key aspect of our service department is knowing what you can handle, and knowing when you need to some help. “Our electricians, our mechanical personnel, and the guys in our rigging shop—they’re all second-to-none, we routinely get calls from surrounding boatyards because they know that our personnel are the best around,” Beckman says. “But we also know when we need to bring in a third-party subcontractor to help us. For instance, we recently did a three-year refit on a 94-foot motoryacht, and one element of that project was a full shaft and propeller replacement. We partnered with a company from Massachusetts and that’s all they do—they’re specialty is big boat shaft replacement. We brought them in, we finished the job, and the work was flawless. Sometimes you need to go to the guys with the specialty tools and equipment, and you can knock out a job in two days that would otherwise take two weeks.”
It is this combination of expertise, personal connections, and humility, that sets Lyman-Morse apart in the world of yacht service. “We have the best people who take pride in their work,” Beckman said. “We provide the best service, and that’s why we get to work on the best boats.”