Back in the day, when a much younger Jim Turner was learning the ways of business at his family’s jam-packed Ritz Bakery in Manasquan on the Jersey Shore, there was a hub of sportfish boatbuilding activity absolutely booming about an hour to the south.
“In my mind, the three hotbeds for builders of sportfish boats is South Florida, the Carolinas and New Jersey,” he says. “All the influence in South Florida came from Rybovich and Merritt, but the most skill, I feel, came from New Jersey.”
South Jersey was home to Pacemaker, which was owned by the same family that created Ocean Yachts. “Then you had Egg Harbor, that was known as the Rybovich of the north. And they were like five miles from Post,” Turner says. Viking Yachts, of course, remains in business today as one of the biggest-name sportfish brands in the world. Also still operating is Henriques Yachts, along with Turner’s company, Release Boatworks, which has been in South Jersey for about a half dozen years.
“We are in one of the old Ocean Yachts buildings. It’s what they used for their overflow. They called it Ocean Two,” he says. “We bought this property, and at the time, they hadn’t built boats for years.”
Turner got into boatbuilding by way of billfishing. He turned his personal passion into a business when he started Casa Vieja Lodge in Guatemala. “My theory was to have all these classic Merritts and Ryboviches from the ’50s and ’60s. I had all those beautiful boats,” he recalls. “A friend of mine said, ‘Aren’t you tired of restoring all these old boats? You should build new boats.’ And I thought: That’s a good idea.”
Turner teamed up with a former owner of the Topaz and Silverhawk yards to create Release Boatworks in 2009. It opened in Guatemala, then moved to Miami, and then, when the business outgrew that Florida location, moved up to Egg Harbor City, New Jersey. “It’s a community with tons of boatbuilding experience,” Turner says. “Being able to hire people who were already experienced is a phenomenal asset of the town.”
Those people are aiming to deliver a dozen Release Boatworks builds each year. There were 10 hulls—from 46 to 55 feet long—on the floor in different stages of construction as of late February. The yard offers flybridge, walkaround and express models at lengths of 34, 43, 46 and 55 feet. The 46 is the bestseller, Turner says, and three of the boats currently in build are the first three hulls of the 55.
But the really exciting build in Turner’s mind is the flybridge version of the 43, known as the 43 Gameboat. Hull No. 1, christened Riser, has been delivered to her owner in Florida, and Turner proudly calls the design “the boat we always wanted to build.”
He had the idea for this boat when he first created Release Boatworks. In fact, he put up a drawing of it—an earlier version, anyway—at the Miami International Boat Show booth where he was promoting his fishing lodge. He managed to sell a boat off that drawing, but the customer wanted a walkaround 46, so that’s the model of boat that he started building instead. “At the end of the day, what I learned is the same as the bakery business: The customer is always right,” he says.
Turner says that as the orders for the 46 kept coming in, he kept fussing over that original 43 flybridge design. He’d tweak it a little here, adjust it a little there. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. “I’d do a profile drawing, and I’d change it again, and change it again, and take it home and show it to my wife and say, ‘What do you think?’” he says. “And she’d say, ‘It looks like every other boat you ever owned.’”
No worries there—he actually took her response as a big compliment.
“It’s a simple concept, but being simple is hard to do,” he says. “That’s the beauty of this boat. It’s a very simple design.”
The 43 Gameboat is also a performer, reportedly topping out at 35 knots with standard twin 550-hp Cummins QSB6.7 diesels. Also available are 600-hp Cummins and Volvo Pentas. Additional options include an Omni sonar, a Seakeeper 6 stabilizer and various towers to go with the standard, fishing-friendly, 140-square-foot cockpit.
But more than anything, Turner says, what he loves about the 43 Gameboat is the look. It has that same classic style that he has always admired, now atop a modern hull.
“I love, on Riser in particular, that it has an open bulkhead. It’s kind of like an homage to what I would call the tuna boats of the ’50s and ’60s,” he says. “Riser looks like it could’ve been built in 1960, and I hope that 30 years from now, it’ll still be a timeless, classic design.”
This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue.
