In the early 1960s, when fiberglass boat construction was rapidly catching on, wooden boatbuilding began its steep decline. But in Bay City, Michigan, the Gougeon brothers felt that wood was still a good material.
Meade, Joel and Jan Gougeon grew up sailing in the 1950s on Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. Like their ancestors, the Gougeon boys would build boats on the city’s beach using wood, bronze Anchorfast nails and Weldwood glue. One of those boats was an Optimist pram that changed Jan’s life, set the brothers off on a professional boatbuilding path and led them to create a line of epoxy products that transformed boatbuilding.
In his later years, Meade, the firstborn, would say that Clark Mills, the designer of the Optimist pram, saved his baby brother from a life of misery. Jan was seven years younger than Meade and sickly from the day he was born. Small, cross-eyed and dyslexic, he was so skinny that kids called him “rack of bones,” which only added to his low self-esteem. But the Opti changed that. When their local yacht club got 30 Opti kits, the Meade boys built one in a week. And even though it was April and cold as hell, Jan, who was just 11, jumped into the pram and sailed it for the next 50 days. After that Jan never lost an Opti race and it was that experience that motivated him to become a professional boatbuilder.
Meade and Jan had used resorcinol glues but those required an inordinate amount of clamping pressure and lacked gap-filling properties. Even though the resorcinol glues had great bonding capabilities, they realized that the joints made with those glues and fasteners were the weakest part of a boat.
In 1959, Jan, who was then 14, started apprenticing with Vic Carpenter, a man whose obsession with perfection would make him a highly sought after builder. Vic was an early proponent for boatbuilding with epoxy. At the time, fiberglass was just beginning to catch on and many wooden boats were still built using the traditional plank-on-frame method. It was Vic who made the Gougeon boys see that epoxy had serious boatbuilding potential.
In 1960, Meade moved to Kansas, where he built a Sunfish-like 14-footer with epoxy. But some of the joints on that boat quickly failed. Meade attributed the failure to having used the wrong type of epoxy and his own lack of experience. In 1963, while living in Erie, Pennsylvania, he built his first trimaran. Meade quickly declared the E1, for Experiment number one, “a disaster,” but he was undeterred. The next year, he built his E2 trimaran, named Pencil, which was so light she broke under her own weight. Meanwhile, one of Jan’s first trimaran designs, Wee Three, didn’t fare much better when an ama broke clean off. But the brothers persisted. They believed it was possible to completely bond large wooden structures efficiently with epoxy, without fasteners. Meade’s E3, Omega, a 25-foot trimaran built in 1965, performed so well at Yachting’s One-of-a-Kind Regatta that it caught the attention of the yachting press. Meade’s boat finished in a little over three hours. That was 51 minutes faster than the second-place boat. Presciently, renowned boating writer Jack Knights reported, “It was enough to write a new chapter in the history of sail.”
Knights had observed that Omega tacked like an iceboat, and that was no accident. Michigan was a hotbed for iceboating and the Gougeons were DN iceboaters. The DN iceboat had been designed for the Detroit News in the 1930s and had quickly become the most popular iceboat in the world. The little racers were fast, but also light, and the high loads they operated under made them prone to operational failures. Broken masts and cracked runner planks were not uncommon. In Meade’s eyes, the DNs were a great test bed for epoxy construction. They would also become the Gougeons’ first commercial enterprise. They would eventually build 200 DNs and they knew how to race them. From 1971 until 2000 Jan dominated DN iceboating, winning four world championships and 11 national championships. Meade would also win national championships in 1981 and 1997.
After Jan had finished a stint in the Army, the boys had returned to Bay City. Besides being a hotbed for sailing and iceboating, the location was also fortuitously close to the Dow Chemical Company. Headquartered just 17 miles down the road from the Gougeons in Midland, Michigan, it was one of the planet’s largest chemical companies and one of the two major base-epoxy suppliers in the U.S. As it happened, Herbert Dow, the grandson of the company’s founder, was an avid sailor who one day walked into the Gougeon’s shop to buy two iceboats. When he saw they were using epoxy he connected Meade to Dow’s epoxy chemists.
The Gougeon brothers knew how to use epoxy as an adhesive, but the Dow chemists helped them figure out how to reformulate epoxy with diluents to do exactly what they wanted. Meade became a bench chemist, experimenting and figuring out how to minimize shrinkage, reduce odor, shorten or lengthen drying times, and use epoxy as a moisture barrier and gap filler. They tried to keep their epoxy recipes secret, but over time word got out that the Gougeons had figured out how to build a faster, lighter, more resilient wooden boat with epoxy. It didn’t take long before other boatbuilders wanted to buy the products the brothers had formulated for their own use.
In 1969, Jan and Meade founded Gougeon Brothers Boatworks, building DNs, multihulls and racing monohulls. That same year, Meade designed, built and launched E4, named Victor T, the lightest Class C competitor at the 1969 Nationals in Hamilton, Ontario, which beat a strong field of wingmast-powered catamarans.
The next year, they launched E5, named Adagio, which would cement their reputation. Built to Meade’s own design, the 35-foot trimaran, his fifth, was the first large, all epoxy bonded and sealed wooden boat built without the use of fasteners. She was not just revolutionary in her construction, but she was fast, too, dominating races around the Great Lakes. Adagio was the culmination of much experimentation and many failures. Their trial-and-error projects taught them how to build the lightest structures possible. Meade would later say they had “failed their way to success.”
Because other builders kept coming to them to buy their epoxy products, in 1971, the brothers introduced the West System (West stood for Wood Epoxy Saturation Technique). The two-part system consisted of a can of resin and a can of hardener with manual pumps to make it easier to correctly meter the mix. They also marketed microfillers and other products to thicken the epoxy.
When their middle brother Joel returned from flying 131 combat missions over Vietnam, Meade told him $10,000 would get him a third of the fledgling business. Joel had saved money to buy a house for himself and his wife but instead pumped his savings into his brothers’ boatbuilding and epoxy ventures. “His wife didn’t speak to me for five years,” Meade later said, “but it turned out alright.”
Having set up epoxy production facilities, they quickly realized that educating their customers about the proper metering, mixing and application of their product would be their greatest challenge. In 1972, they introduced The West System Technical Manual. They would also publish other manuals, including Wooden Boat Restoration & Repair and Fiberglass Boat Repair and Maintenance.
While selling epoxy, their boatbuilding business took off. In 1973, they built the coldmolded Ron Holland-designed monohull Golden Dazy, which would win the 1975 Canada Cup and prove pound for pound that wood and epoxy hulls could be stiffer and stronger than fiberglass hulls. Golden Dazy was followed by the 32-foot Hot Flash, a Gary Mull-designed half-ton monohull racer. Sailors and designers now knew that Gougeon multihulls and monohulls were capable of beating the fastest boats on the water.
By now, boat yards also realized that epoxy was a great product to repair fiberglass boats. The epoxy business took up so much of the brothers’ time that they had to hire other professionals to meet their boatbuilding obligations. They found themselves constantly giving people technical advice about epoxy construction, so in 1977 they produced the first issue of The Boatbuilder, a newsletter about building and repairing boats with West System epoxy.
At the same time their boats continued to gather the attention of some of the hottest designers and sailors of the era. Hot Flash was followed by Rogue Wave, a Dick Newick-designed 60-foot trimaran for Phil Weld who was going to race her in the 1980 Observer Single-Handed Transatlantic Race until a new rule limited boat size to 56 feet. The 65-year-old Weld would use the 51-foot Moxie, another Newick-designed trimaran built using West System epoxies, to become the first American and the oldest to win the 1980 OSTAR.
In 1978, the Gougeons collaborated with the Harken brothers and North Sails to build a boat to break the 500-meter speed sailing record. The Gougeons were commissioned to build the 60-foot proa Slingshot, to compete at the annual 500-meter speed trials in Weymouth, England. The boat’s name was a loose reference to what would happen if one of them fell off the control pod. The thinking was that at speed, the rest of the crew would get slingshot over the mast, or worse, through the rigging. With Jan and Olav and Peter Harken among the crew, Slingshot recorded the second-fastest speed at the trials. Two years later, in Texas City, Texas, she hit a speed of 38 knots, an unofficial world record.
In 1979, the brothers published a how-to book, The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction: Wood and West System Epoxy. Meade had put the 400-plus-page book together over a three-year period with input from Jan and Joel and with drawings and text contributions from Rob Monroe to explain the West System coldmolded boatbuilding technique. The book would spawn a cottage industry of backyard coldmolded boatbuilding.
That year would be a memorable one for Jan. His self-designed, Gougeon-built trimaran Flicka capsized in the Atlantic during a solo race from Bermuda to Newport. Jan spent four days living inside the upside-down hull while trying to get the attention of nearby vessels. Afraid he would get caught by the damaged rigging if he tried to swim out of the inverted hull, he used a chisel and hacksaw blade from his toolbox to cut a hole through the bottom of the boat. His EPIRB failed, his VHF was shorted out and none of the passing vessels saw his flares. Frustrated that so many vessels never saw him, he used salvaged rigging to raise the boat’s profile to catch a ship’s attention. Eventually, an officer on a Russian tanker spotted the wreckage, and Jan was rescued, but Flicka had to be abandoned at sea.
While living inside the turtled Flicka, Jan decided he would never design another trimaran without self-rescuing capabilities. In 1980, he launched Splinter, a 25-footer he had drawn on Flicka’s inverted roof while waiting to be rescued. Splinter would place first in the Port Huron to Mackinac Race in 1981, 1982 and 1983, and set a record for fastest finish.
By 1983, the business was on solid footing. The Gougeons wanted to share their good fortune with the people who worked for them and laid the groundwork to make Gougeon Brothers, Inc. an employee-owned company.
Their epoxy-based construction methods translated to areas outside boatbuilding, even beyond Earth. In the late 1970s, they manufactured laminated wood specimens for NASA’s Wind Energy Project Office. The samples they created were so strong they broke NASA’s test equipment. In the mid-1980s, they built 65-foot wind turbine blades for Westinghouse and their blade-building method was later used by the Jon Staudacher Bay City airplane company to build wings for airplanes using West System epoxy.
Boats continued to be constructed for clients, but Gougeon Brothers was transitioning from a boatbuilding company into a chemical company. In 1988, in-house chemists at Gougeon developed GLR/GLH, a laminating epoxy used to coldmold wind blades for Westinghouse and to build Adrenalin, a Formula 40 trimaran with articulating amas. Launched in 1987 she won a close second place during her first regatta, the Formula 40 Grand Prix circuit in Brest, France. In the early 1990s they built a number of G-32 production boats, but with the epoxy side of the business booming, it was decided that the boatbuilding business should be shut down. Soon after, GLR/GLH was rebranded to become an OEM epoxy brand named Pro-Set, which is now the go-to epoxy for professional boatbuilders. The West System epoxy products continue to be produced for non-OEM customers.
Even though the boatbuilding business had been shut down, Jan and Meade continued to use the boatshop. In 2007, they launched the 32-foot Gougmaran powerboats for their own use. The shallow-water cruisers were built on Dick Newick-designed hulls for comfort, stability, low wetted surface, minimal wake and great fuel efficiency. In 2011, they built the Chris Beckwith-designed i550, an 18-foot stitch-and-glue sportboat they raced in the grueling, 300-mile Everglades Challenge. Meade would continue to compete in the Everglades Challenge, winning first in his class in the outrigger canoe Voyager in 2014, and in another outrigger canoe called Elderly Care in 2017.
Jan passed away in 2012 and Meade died in 2017. They were inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame in 2015. The brothers who slapped an Opti together on the beach back in 1956 are gone, but Gougeon Brothers is still thriving in Bay City. The boat shop is still there, but it’s been absorbed into a much larger facility that includes a technical lab for new product innovation where, technicians continue to give support to customers. A production facility manufactures all the Gougeon Brothers products sold in the Western Hemisphere and Asia. Their epoxies are now available all over the world through licensing agreements with companies in the U.K and Australia. Gougeon Brothers purchased Entropy Resins, the maker of a bio-based epoxy in 2018 and now also distributes Pro-Vac vacuum bag consumables through a collaborative agreement.
The West System Technical Manual, renamed the West System User Manual & Product Guide, is now available in 18 languages. The boatbuilder newsletter, renamed Epoxyworks, is in its 47th year of publication with a print readership of 80,000. The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction has sold more than 100,000 copies and is in its fifth edition. It is used as a textbook at boatbuilding schools around the world.
The company is still family run. Meade’s daughter Renee takes care of the employee benefits and her husband, Alan Gurski, serves as CEO. It also remains employee-owned, and the office culture continues to be like one big family, even with 55 employees. As they did when Meade and Jan ran it, the office still closes one business day a year for a golf outing with a picnic and a party in the boat shop. And just like in the 1970s, when the brothers answered the phone, you can still call Gougeon Brothers and have a human answer your technical questions.
Jan’s self-rescuing boats continue to compete on the Great Lakes today and 54 years after her launch Adagio is still racing. She is still the fastest rated boat under 40 feet on the Great Lakes and a testament to Jan and Meade’s hunch that a better, faster, stronger boat can be built with just wood and epoxy. It was the Gougeon brothers who figured that out.
This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue.
