Spring has sprung, but even though it’s almost 6 a.m. it’s still dark when I park in front of the machine shop at Billings Diesel and Marine in Stonington, Maine.
Two cars pull up next to me and I ask the drivers where I might find Greg Sanborn. “He’ll be here in a few minutes,” one of them tells me. “He’ll park right there in front of the door.”
Like clockwork, at 6 a.m., Sanborn’s Chevrolet Silverado pulls up to the door. The truck is barely parked when the yard’s longtime service manager hops out and marches into the shop. Sanborn says hello to the workers as he crosses the shop floor, drops his bag in his office and sits down at his computer. He takes a quick look at his emails and within minutes returns to the 6,000-square-foot shop where he talks to the employees about what they’re working on and what needs doing next.
I’ve come to Billings because Maine’s boatbuilders keep telling me it’s the place for engine work and that Sanborn is the guy who makes things happen. I’m told he is a nice guy—“salt of the earth” is how Rockport Marine’s Sam Temple describes him—but I don’t get the impression that Sanborn is particularly keen on having me follow him around like a puppy dog. I probably didn’t help matters when I surprised him while he was getting out of his car in the dark. Despite that, he agrees to let me tag along.
As we cross the yard to the paint shop, Sanborn says a few of the mechanics start at 6 a.m. and that the rest of the crew will show up at 7. We enter a paint bay, where he climbs up to the deck of a well-used 36-foot Novi and checks in with mechanic Robert Hutchinson. The Novi got a new QSL9 Cummins engine, new shaft tube, shaft, wiring and a shiny new prop, but she is not getting a paint job; she’s there because it was the only indoor spot Sanborn had available to fix a boat whose owner needs to get back to hauling traps.
Billings Diesel has a reputation for getting things done. When Sanborn showed up on Moose Island in 1980 as a 21-year-old mechanic with a degree from Kennebec Valley Vocational Technical Institute, it didn’t take him long to figure out what the yard’s priorities were. Everything was aimed at getting boats fixed and back on the water, especially if it was a working boat. Dick Billings, who saved the yard from bankruptcy in the 1960s, had a saying: “Get it done and get ’em going.” Sanborn and the yard’s crew still live by that motto.
It was Dick’s father Cecil and his three brothers who founded the yard in 1928. They started out on Little Deer Isle by building and maintaining coastal schooners, but in the 1930s they paid $800 for an abandoned granite quarry on Moose Island and moved their operations there to gain more space. During World War II, the yard, then known as the Stonington-Deer Isle Yacht Basin Corp., constructed personnel transports, minesweepers and sub chasers, and after the war built wooden draggers and maintained Maine’s wooden windjammers. But by 1966, with wooden boats falling out of favor and without government work, the business had fallen into bankruptcy.
To save the yard, Dick—who worked as a fisherman and flew a floatplane to spot fish—found himself at a Bar Harbor Bank office sitting next to Nelson Rockefeller, who was then the Governor of New York and one of the richest men in America. Rockefeller was holding a $125,000 check and when the banker asked Rockefeller why he wanted the yard he told him the truth. Rockefeller had a couple of his personal yachts there, and he wanted to buy it for his personal use. The banker then turned to Dick Billings who’d barely managed to scrape $25,000 together from friends and family. Billings said he wanted to run it as a commercial boatyard, which would provide employment for local residents. The banker sold the yard to Dick.
Dick didn’t waste time to make a go of it. He added a used Travelift so they wouldn’t be limited to the yard’s three marine railways, and in 1976 he convinced his son Harlan to leave the U.S. Coast Guard to help him run the business. Four years after that, Harlan hired Sanborn who’d grown up tinkering on cars in Ellsworth, 38 miles north of Stonington. Sanborn wasn’t a boater, but it didn’t take Harlan long to figure out that the kid was a go-getter.
In 1985, Sanborn quit Billings to help deliver a 100-foot yacht down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers to Florida. Nine months later he returned to the yard. “I thought I wanted to go yachting,” Sanborn admits with a sheepish smile. Harlan hired him right back and two years later promoted him to shop foreman. Not long after, Harlan elevated Sanborn again, this time to service and engine sales manager. More than 30 years later, Sanborn still holds both positions. The 15 employees in the machine, fiberglass, carpentry, and paint shops answer to him, and it’s his job to see to it that all the work and launchings happen on time.
After checking on the Novi, Sanborn pops over to another bay for an update on Norman & Mary. The 45-foot wooden John’s Bay Boat had its old 6140 Lugger replaced with a rebuilt 6140 and is getting a little paint and a new rubber deck. After checking on the progress, Sanborn heads for another building by the docks.
When Sanborn joined Billings, there were about five buildings, including a huge wooden WWII-era quonset hut that burned in a massive conflagration in 1983. Now there are more than a dozen buildings, many of them large metal sheds. Sanborn heads down to the docks where the floats are filled with lobster boats. Some of them are getting worked on by the yard and others are there because their owners want shore power during the winter months. I ask Sanborn if the water ever freezes over. “The harbor used to ice up,” he tells me, “but it hasn’t for years. Global warming.”
The moorings and summer floats haven’t gone in yet, but the pleasure craft Billings stores every winter will soon be commissioned. “We have a short season up here,” he says, “so we need to get them in on time.”
The yard cares about pleasure boaters—the marina has showers, laundry, WiFi, moorings for boats up to 50 feet and dockage for boats up to 130 feet—but neither Dick nor Harlan ever apologized for giving working boats first dibs on service. “The commercial side is the priority,” Sanborn says.
And there’s no shortage of commercial boats. Stonington is the top location for lobster landings. In 2022, the town brought in a record $75 million worth of the state’s iconic seafood and it has the largest lobster fleet in the state—more than 250 boats—an impressive number for a town with around 1,000 residents.
Besides local lobstermen, fishermen from Massachusetts to the Canadian border get their boats fixed at Billings, and most of the area’s boatyards—among them Rockport Marine, Brooklin Boat Yard, Front Street Shipyard and Lyman-Morse—send engine work to Billings, too.
On the docks, Sanborn heads for Brynn Marie, a 46-foot Duffy with a 1,000-hp C18 Caterpillar that Sanborn says, “has issues.” He climbs over the gunwale and talks to mechanic Jake Shipman. After discussing a potential fix, they head back up to the office, get on computers and call out part numbers to each other. Sanborn and Shipman walk through the machine shop into the ship’s store where parts are organized by engine manufacturer. Sanborn gets to the Caterpillar aisle, bends down, pulls a part out of a box and says, “this ought to work” and hands it to Shipman.
Sanborn spots a plastic-wrapped exhaust riser on the counter. He asks the parts manager how it got there and is told the boat owner’s girlfriend dropped it off. I ask if it’s common for owners’ girlfriends to drop off boat parts. “That happens a lot,” Sanborn says with no sarcasm.
He heads back to the machine shop and talks to shop foreman Will Morey about a Detroit Diesel 4-71 that is one of three engines that supply electricity on Matinicus, an island 20 miles off the Maine coast. The engine’s cam follower roll failed, damaged the camshaft and took out the head and piston. The head now has extra holes in it and the valves are a mess. It’s not pretty.
When Sanborn started at Billings, two-cycle Detroit Diesels provided all the work. “That’s all there was,” he says. “The 53, 71 and 92 series, and the 149 were all two-cycle.” In the 1990s, Billings got into Caterpillar and Cummins diesels and by the late ’90s, due to stricter emission standards, the two-cycle Detroit Diesels had been discontinued. Today Billings is a dealer for Cat, Cummins, Volvo, MAN, Yanmar, Scania and MTU (which merged with Detroit Diesel in 2000). “We handle all except FPT and John Deere,” Sanborn says.
Billings is a full-service yard that can handle all kinds of marine work from carpentry, painting and varnishing to fiberglass, rigging and welding. But engines are what the yard is known for. “We’ve always been engine guys,” Sanborn says. “That’s always been our work.” Sanborn sells about 25 new diesel engines per year and the yard works on hundreds of engines annually, but Billings doesn’t handle outboards. “We send all the outboards to Dean’s,” Sanborn says about Dean’s Automotive & Small Engine on Main Street in Stonington. “He’s our outboard guy. The only gas engines we work on are Volvos and that’s because we’re a certified dealer.”
After getting a status report on the Detroit Diesel from Matinicus, Sanborn walks up to the one boat in the machine shop. Cross Fire is a 40-foot Young Brothers lobster boat that sank due to a stuffing box leak. The boat is surrounded by engines on pallets. “We’re going through the whole thing,” Sanborn says about the boat. I ask if they’re going to rebuild the engine. Sanborn says they’re replacing it because new parts have become so expensive. “It’s cheaper than fixing them,” he says. They’ve found it’s not worth it to overhaul heavily damaged engines or that require a lot of electrical parts from a sinking. “We’ll salvage some parts from the old ones,” he adds.
Sanborn asks one of the mechanics to go look at a lobster boat that has an engine that won’t turn over. “I’m sure it’s a rusty mess,” he tells him, then returns to his office where he takes a phone call. He listens, asks a couple of questions and simply tells the caller to “bring it in.”
He crosses the yard again and detours to introduce me to Peter Grindle who is headed for his office. Grindle is married to Harlan’s daughter Suzette, who became president of the yard before Harlan died in 2020. The Grindles now own Billings. “Suzette has worked here longer than I have,” the 63-year-old Sanborn tells me. “And she’s eight or nine years younger than me.”
Sanborn returns to the Novi in the paint shed where he and Hutchinson fire up the engine a few times to make sure she’s ready for launch. As we leave the shed, Sanborn notices two wet spots underneath the Novi’s keel. The damp spot below the prop doesn’t concern him, but the puddle two feet in front of the prop does. He crawls under the boat and finds a small hole under the keel that’s actively dripping water. Sanborn considers the possibility that it may be a drain hole that didn’t get glassed up, so he asks Hutchinson, but the mechanic tells him he didn’t drill a drain hole.
By now, I’m beginning to see how Sanborn looks at everything, knows where everything is, and manages to scrutinize every detail. I ask him how he remembers it all. “I keep track of things on the computer, although most of it’s in my head.”
Back in his office, Sanborn talks to Shipman again, then tells me we’re going for a boat ride. One of Brynn Marie’s “issues” is excessive oil consumption, so Sanborn and Shipman want to take her for a ride to check the level of crankcase blowby.
Before we depart, Shipman puts his earmuffs on, pulls the engine cover that does double duty as the wheelhouse sole, and puts the large steel plate on the aft deck. With most of the wheelhouse floor now missing and the big Caterpillar exposed, Sanborn fires her up. Almost instantly the wheelhouse fills with smoke. But Shipman and Sanborn are unperturbed, and by the time we pull the boat into the Deer Island Thorofare a lot of the smoke has cleared. While Shipman monitors the engine, Sanborn steers for Penobscot Bay. As Sanborn incrementally increases the RPMs, each man takes a turn walking to the stern to check for exhaust smoke. By the time we approach the Deer Island Thorofare Lighthouse on Mark Island we’re at wide open throttle. The 1,000-hp diesel roars as the 46-foot Duffy carves a sizable wake through the water, but it’s the spray coming up from the bow that’s truly impressive. Amidships, almost 3 feet above the gunwale, a solid wall of water is flying by.
Just past the lighthouse, Sanborn turns the boat through her own wake and heads back to the yard. As we near Crotch Island he slows down, turns into Allen Cove and after shimmying the boat back and forth backs Brynn Marie into the slip. “She doesn’t run too bad,” Sanborn says to Shipman, although they agree more work needs to be done.
I ask Sanborn whether he owns a boat, which makes him chuckle. “Wouldn’t want anything to do with it,” he says with a smile but then tells me that over the years he’s done a lot of boating. “I’ve delivered boats from as far as Seattle, crossed through the Panama Canal and done sailboat races,” he says. For a dozen years he raced in the Yarmouth Cup from Falmouth, Maine, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. He thought parts of some long deliveries were cool, but that a lot of it was also boring. “It wasn’t a pleasure cruise,” he says about a five-week delivery he once did.
But it’s not like Sanborn doesn’t like boats or boating. I ask him what his favorite part of the job is. “I like to drive boats,” he tells me. “I like the technical stuff. I hate the estimating, and there was a time I missed the wrenching, but I like the troubleshooting. We’re pretty good at figuring shit out.”
When we return to the office, rigging manager Cory McDonald’s 4-year-old twin daughters are sitting in a cardboard box, pretending to be in a boat. “We got a boat for you to work on, Greg,” McDonald says to Sanborn. “The best kind,” Sanborn quips from behind his desk. “It ain’t got a motor,” which makes everyone in the room laugh.
After another short stint at the computer, Sanborn crosses the yard to the paint shop for the third time where he checks in on the Anna Mary, a 40 RP, a Willis Beal design. She’s getting some of her asphalt deck tiles replaced. Even though rubber decking is becoming more common, asphalt deck tiles still have their adherents among certain lobstermen and boatbuilders who think rubber decking isn’t durable.
Sanborn climbs down from the 40 RP and walks to a covered Boston Whaler that has a mysterious problem. He runs his finger along the boat’s hard chine, which has been sanded down, but a sticky substance is still seeping out of small holes in the hull. Sanborn and paint shop foreman Doug Siebert have been trying to put an end to it, but when Siebert walks over to discuss the problem with Sanborn he tells me that the boat’s been leaching water for almost five months. The two men decide they’ll have to grind the hull down more to lick the problem.
One bay over, I spot a handsome wooden boat that’s about to be repainted. Sanborn says it’s a 1920s William Hand motorsailer that’s been coming in every winter for 20 years and belongs to the yard’s best client. I ask him who the owner is, and Sanborn tells me, but after hearing the famous name, we agree I better not publish it.
We stop over at the Novi for a third time and run into the boat’s owner. He wants to do some additional work himself and Sanborn tells him he’s welcome to do it because the boat can’t be moved for another few days. Before we leave, Sanborn asks the owner if he knows there’s a hole in the keel of his boat. Without hesitation, the owner tells Sanborn that he probably put the hole in the keel while installing a bilge pump with a screw that “was probably a little too long.” As we walk across the yard, I ask Sanborn if he’s seen that one before. “Oh yeah,” he says with a glint in his eye, “we see everything.”
By the time we return to Sanborn’s office I figure it must be at least noon, but when I look at my phone, I see it’s only 9 a.m. In three hours, Sanborn has answered phone calls, checked emails, chatted with each of the employees at least once, circled the yard three times, walked the docks, climbed on and off practically every boat, sleuthed a few problems and gone for a boat ride. I ask him what time he usually goes home. “I’m usually here until 4:30,” he says, but I’ll work 3 to 4 hours on Saturday. We’re gonna start launching pleasure craft. I’m gonna have to test run every boat, which means about 50 pleasure craft instead of just lobster boats.”
As much as I love boats and hanging out in boatyards, in just three hours Sanborn’s worn me out. It’s time to go. Outside the machine shop, standing next to the white Chevy truck with the Billings logo I ask Sanborn what year the truck is. He doesn’t know because it isn’t his truck. “It belonged to the boss,” Sanborn says. He sounds almost wistful and tells me that after Harlan died three years ago Suzette told him to use her father’s truck.
Over the previous three hours, whenever Sanborn mentioned Harlan—which was frequently—I could swear his voice would trail off. More than once Sanborn told me, “Harlan was the reason I started, and the reason I stayed so long.”
Not long before he died, Harlan told a reporter that Sanborn was an important part of the Billings operation. “Hiring Greg years ago was one of the best things I ever did,” he was quoted as saying, and in a separate interview with Soundings Trade Only he told the magazine that Sanborn is “the glue that holds this place together.”
This article was originally published in the June 2023 issue.
