Portland Yacht Services was a hive of activity on this morning in late April as the boating season was about to burst open like the trees, shrubs and flowers along the Portland, Maine, waterfront. The pace at the boatyard on West Commercial Street was industrious, but not frenetic. Everything felt under control as I walked the full-service yard with owner Phineas Sprague Jr. and his wife, Joanna.

The yard is unique for the range of vessels it repairs and services: 70-mph freshwater bass boats and 90-foot fishing draggers; classic wooden cruisers and many of the tugs, ferries, lobster boats and other commercial craft found in Portland Harbor; wooden schooners and the full array of fiberglass pleasure boats. That’s the reason the shipyard invested in a 300-ton Travelift to augment its 150-ton lift.

I’ve been around a lot of boatyards in spring, and this one felt particularly calm. There was plenty of work going on but no shouting. No foreman losing his cool on a wide-eyed scrub new to boatyard work. Everyone was focused and busy. We walked and talked for more than two hours as I scribbled notes and surveyed the diverse fleet of recreational and commercial craft in the 16-plus-acre yard. After an hour, I was surprised to realize that the cell phone in the chest pocket of Sprague’s wool vest rarely rang. In most yards this time of year the top guy is inundated with calls from owners or yard workers. What was up?

“You noticed no phone calls,” Sprague said. “They don’t need me. That lets me be free to look at the horizon and not at my feet. We hire good people. We empower them to make decisions. And then I get the hell out of the way. I’m not in the trenches anymore, but I need to give them the right ammunition to do the job.”

When Sprague, 75, decided to build a large repair yard on West Commercial Street, his vision was clear. “The purpose of the boatyard is to be an asset to the harbor,” said Sprague, who has been messing around in boats since he was 6 years old, and whose family (on both sides) has a long history in Portland. And by asset, he means all the boats in the harbor, from a new pleasure boat right off a container ship from Scandinavia to a chalky 40-year-old convertible, which is someone’s pride and joy. Part of his goal was to create an operation that will continue long after he has gone.

With his grey beard and upright carriage, Sprague resembles a seasoned merchant captain from another century. He speaks with the authority of a blue-water sailor with thousands of miles under his keel. (He started a 4-year circumnavigation right after he graduated college on the 72-foot schooner Mariah.) Sprague, who has a science degree from Harvard and an MBA from Northeastern, is pragmatic. “This is a service business,” he said. “People have to trust you, and trust comes from reputation. The issue is very fundamental.”

A wary lion in winter, he is proud that his company has never had to lay anyone off. “People want to work here,” Sprague said. “We treat them well. It’s a family, and family comes first. I set the standard of behavior for this group. We need to take care of each other. If you can’t do that, you can’t take care of your customers.”

The Right Partner

Joanna has been Phin’s partner and right hand for decades. He met her in 1973 on a beach in Florida, when Mariah was in a yard there undergoing repairs following the rough first leg of his circumnavigation, southward from Maine.

Joanna’s family ran a small marina and campground in Canada, where she used to deliver newspapers to customers in a little powerboat. She’d been working in Florida as a registered nurse. She joined the crew of Mariah in Panama. Joanna and Phin fell in love on the voyage and were married in Bali on the schooner on Christmas Day 1975.

They both joke that upon returning to Maine in 1977, it was difficult for them to be more than 72 feet from one another. A photo from a Maine regatta last summer showed Phin at the wheel of his 65-foot schooner Lion’s Whelp with Joanna perched just behind him in a familiar position, keeping a watchful eye for potential trouble, just as she did during the circumnavigation. “Joanna paid attention to what was going on around me so I could pay attention to the boat,” said Sprague. “She made sure I didn’t trip. She’s put up with a lot of stuff.”

Joanna also played a big role in running the Maine Boatbuilders Show and oversees the day-to-day shipyard operations. The couple have three children and six grandkids. “Joanna is mother to everybody,” Sprague said. “She’s always done the boat shows and basically made sure that everything worked in the office. But, you know, there were many times that she would walk down the railroad tracks in tears because she didn’t know how she was going to make payroll. It’s been hard, but also very rewarding. It couldn’t have been done without her here.”

Expansion

Looking to expand their repair business in the early 2000s, the Spragues sold their 10-acre business at the eastern end of the harbor on Fore Street when zoning laws changed to encourage a more mixed use. They planned to move to an industrial site along the west end of the waterfront, which had been a contaminated brown field. Sprague worked on a remediation plan, along with getting permits and building community support.

Before they could break ground, however, the Maine Department of Transportation took 18 acres by eminent domain for the Icelandic shipping company Eimskip, according to Sprague. “That was tough,” Sprague says. “Four years of hell before we could start construction.” The setback is now in their wake and Sprague says his yard enjoys a good relationship with its neighbors.

Portland Yacht Services has about 12,000 customers and 350 boats, which they store for the winter. Sprague started with a hydraulic Brownell Trailer and a boat ramp before circumstances allowed for a 150-ton (metric) Travelift. That soon proved too small. The yard added a 300-ton (metric) Travelift hoist in 2018, which enables Sprague and his team to service ferries, commercial fishing boats, fire and pilot boats and the largest of pleasure boats.

“We’re running out of room,” said Sprague. “We have one more really big building to put up.”

If a job requires a specialist that Sprague doesn’t have on staff, he often finds a subcontractor rather than making a full-time hire. That way he avoids the need for layoffs once the project is done. “The business is so different now,” he says. “We’re growing so fast we need to keep finding efficiencies.”

Sprague says his business degree has been critical to running a shipyard, where keeping your eye on the ball is paramount—knowing your costs, understanding your customers, estimating jobs correctly, ensuring workers maintain training and various certifications, and dozens of other good business practices that are regularly put to the test.

“An existing customer is proven cash flow,” he says. “If we take really good care of them, we’ll have them until they time out. It takes money to grow. The profitability of the yard determines the pace of growth. If the yard isn’t profitable, you can’t grow.”

On a rare occasion, Sprague said, the yard fires a customer. “If we can’t make you happy,” he says, “this isn’t the place for you. They have to fit into the system.”

Mentors

Sprague rowed crew at Harvard, an experience that taught him to push for the seemingly impossible. It also demonstrated the value and joy of being part of a team intently focused on a common goal. The lesson has been instrumental in his life.

“You drive yourself and compete with yourself. You have to have an intense loyalty to the rest of the team,” he said. “It’s been hard in my life to find the same level of dedicated purpose.”

The service yard satisfies some of those aspirations, as does the role he plays in sail training, for which Sprague is an ardent advocate. He is the founding president of SailMaine, a non-profit community small-boat sailing program based in Portland. Another one of Sprague’s projects is the Harvey Gamage, the 131-foot gaff-rigged topsail sail-training schooner, which the yard maintains.

Sprague’s baptism in the salt came early in the form of a 13-foot flat-bottom skiff, built by a carpenter at the family’s saltwater farm on Cape Elizabeth. (As a 6-year-old, Sprague used to sleep in the horse barn in summer until allergy attacks forced him out.) He still owns that skiff in which as a child he found both relief and a slice of heaven. “I’d get in that dinghy and with a southwest breeze, my allergies would go away,” Sprague recalled.

His grandfather had cut a deal with local lobsterman Stan Doughty to keep an eye on his grandson when he was knocking about on the water. Once while paddling out in a canoe to get his skiff off its mooring, he learned a lesson about underestimating the strength of an offshore wind while standing under the lee of the shore. The wind got hold of the canoe that day, leaving young Sprague at its mercy and fearing he’d be blown offshore.

“As far as I was concerned, I was going to be in England,” Sprague remembered. “I was paddling like hell. Crying like hell. No one was watching me. No life jacket.”

From the corner of his eye, Sprague glimpsed Doughty coming up behind in his own skiff. “He came over and laid a hand on the gunwale, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Well young master Sprague, you must be looking for a bus,’” Sprague recalled. “He took the painter and pulled me into the beach. I guess he rescued me four or five times. He never said, ‘You stupid little kid. You should have known better.’ He didn’t have to. He let me internalize it myself. He was an important guy in my life.”

Sprague also remembers paddling to Little Ram Island, where he’d pick up a gull egg, bring it back to the homestead and put it in an incubator, where it would hatch along with the chickens. “The gull would be my companion all summer long,” Sprague remembers. “I’d go out and catch pollack to feed it.”

His great-grandmother gave him a Turnabout when he was 10, and he learned to sail at Prouts Neck Yacht Club, where he spent summer days until he was about 13.

Sprague is a strong believer in the power of the life lessons drawn from sailing and mentors. “The tool kit you put together as a kid is the foundation for your future life,” said Sprague. “It can really change the direction of your life. That’s why sail training is so important, and why having mentors is important too.”

A precocious Sprague needed some attitude adjustment and direction when he began preparatory school. “The headmaster at Tabor saved my life,” recalled Sprague. “I was a little shit. He put his arm around me and said, ‘You’re a smart kid. Why are you doing all this to yourself?’”

There were others too whom he credits with giving him the space to find himself—a rowing coach at Harvard, various professors, those he met doing summer field work, his parents and grandparents. His great, great-grandfather’s rock collection led him into geology, an interest which was further stoked at Tabor. He majored in geology at Harvard, believing he would wind up working in his family’s coal and energy business. The business, however, was sold while he was in college.

He worked as a geological field assistant in Maine during a couple of college summers and also helped map the Allagash region for two summers, living alone in a tent with his dog.

He says the mapping and geological work he did in college was useful in helping him better interpret charts from far-flung areas that he traversed during his circumnavigation, sailing by celestial navigation. In particular, he credits his interest in geomorphology—the study of how various topographic and bathymetric landforms were created—for giving him a better understanding of what was and wasn’t on the charts in the remote waters they cruised. “It was an around-the-world geology field trip,” Sprague said.

Schooner Man

While Sprague was working on his MBA, a friend asked if he could install fenders on a new Boston Whaler. Joanna was pregnant at the time and money was tight, so Sprague was happy for the job. Sprague started maintaining boats at the Prouts Neck Yacht Club after the former boat man there suffered a heart attack. And as business grew, the Spragues moved it into an old potato barn on Cape Elizabeth. Zoning rules eventually forced them to relocate to The Portland Company on Fore Street in Portland, which was empty at the time. The couple started Portland Yacht Services there, as well as hosting the Maine Boatbuilders Show and an annual flower show.

I first met Sprague at the Maine Boatbuilders Show, a festive gathering of the flannel-and-jeans tribe who appreciate traditional craft. The annual March show was the antithesis of the “plastic” boat shows that dominate the pleasure boat landscape.

Sprague calls himself a “heretic” and enjoys going against the grain. At his Maine show, he required exhibitors to have either the company owner or a knowledgeable employee in the booth rather than someone just handing out brochures and taking cards. “It attracted knowledgeable people,” he said. “There was more brainpower in the aisles than you could believe.” Covid drove the nails into the show’s coffin. “That broke my heart, but times change,” said Sprague, the odd old-line New Englander who remains open to change and surprises.

That comes with a caveat of sorts, which Sprague emphasized by quoting George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

“So, I’m a thoroughly unreasonable person,” Sprague told me. “My great-grandfather said have a vision. He said look forward.”

He also is an unapologetic schooner man. He owns four: Lion’s Whelp, Tar Baby, Harvey Gamage and Westward. “I wanted a schooner since I was a kid,” he recalled. “The schooner was the pickup truck or the 18-wheeler of its day.”

He considers schooners to be among the most sea-kindly, well-behaved and sensibly designed sailing craft, especially those designed by Eldridge-McInnis and John Alden. But Sprague is also nondenominational when it comes to the boats he services in the yard.

“Don’t look at a boat through your own eyes,” said Sprague. “A good boat does what you want it to do. The test is, does it serve your needs efficiently.”

The yard services a surprising number of freshwater bass boats and contemporary plumb-bow Scandinavian speedsters, along with multihull sailboats, vintage wooden cruisers, aluminum craft, draggers, scallop boats, ferries, head boats and classics handed down from one generation to the next.

This summer, Sprague hopes to cruise the long, narrow inland passage of Petit Rigolet off the Strait of Belle Isle on the northeast coast of Quebec with friends on Lion’s Whelp, his 65-foot Alden-designed schooner that bears the name of the ship that carried Sprague’s forebears to the New World in 1629.

“The people there are wonderful,” said Sprague. “All the nooks and crannies. I can explore like I did when I was a youngster. It’s almost like a circle-the-wagons attitude, where everyone watches out for one another.” In many ways, Sprague’s life and loves have come full circle.  

This article was originally published in the August 2023 issue.