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You’re talking about
my favorite subject,”
says Gene Woodbury,
71, of Wilmington’s
Woodbury
Insurance. “Boats.”
A graduate of
New Hanover High
School, UNC Chapel
Hill, and an insurance
school in Georgia,
Woodbury owns and pilots Stardust, a
36-foot Picnic Boat, built by the Hinckley
Company, which has been designing and
building boats and yachts since 1928.
“She’s a nice little boat,” Woodbury
says. “She’s a Yankee boat, built up in
Southwest Harbor, Maine, designed for
the Maine coast, from about Rhode Island
on up. There’s no air conditioning and it
has enclosed windows that don’t open.”
Woodbury’s been around boats most of his
life and retains details about many of them.
“We had a family boat,” he recalls of a
time in the 1950s when he and his family
summered at Wrightsville Beach, spending
most of the time, on the water. “It was
a 16-foot, Wagemaker Wolverine with a
25-hp Johnson on it. I loved that boat. We
fished a lot with it. My father and I used to
go fishing on it before he went to work.”
By his calculation, he’s personally
owned between 10 and 20 boats in his
lifetime. This latest, Stardust, was named
after a 50-foot Gulfstar ketch he owned
when his interests leaned more toward
sailing. Not that boating has been
Woodbury’s only passion. He’s also a
licensed pilot, and until November 2010,
owned a plane. He tells, too, of sky diving,
a hobby that got off to a bad start
when he broke both of his legs on his
first jump. His primary interest in boats
is shared by most members of his family,
including a son, two daughters and six
grandchildren.
“My son is in the movie business,” he
says, “and works as a marine coordinator
with a variety of production companies,
so we’ve accumulated boats over the years.
I keep three or four in the water all the
time. We own several sailboats between
us and have an assortment of small boats,
including four or five Boston Whalers.”
The Stardust, he’ll tell you, was bought
over a couple of gin and tonics, from
a man who owned a machine shop in
Greensboro.
“I knew him from boating and we’d
developed a real close relationship,”
Woodbury says. “We were just sitting
around and I asked somebody to give me
one good reason to buy that boat, and
they gave me one. The price was right,
too,” he said, “which always helps. And
one day, if the good Lord’s willing and the
creek don’t rise, maybe I’ll have an even
bigger boat.”
Although Mark Batson’s
24-foot, rigid hull inflatable,
bears no official name, it is
known to him and assorted
family and acquaintances as the
Rubber Ducky.
“I bought it from the Navy
a year and a half ago at a San
Diego auction,” says Batson,
a Wilmington native, spear
fisherman, scuba diver, licensed
sea captain, airplane pilot and
hands-on home builder for his
company, Tongue and Groove.
“I was looking for something
like it online and bought it sight
unseen. It’s something I have a passion for.”
Batson sat for his captain’s test when he was 18 and holds a Master 100-ton license.
As to his choice of vessel, he says he was drawn to the ex-Navy inflatable because, “it does
real well in heavy seas. It has a heavy, fiberglass center section and a steep dead rise. As the
bow cuts through the water, it gets a spray that’s deflected away, so it’s a very dry boat.”
Outfitted with a Cummins diesel 210 B series engine with a Konrad outdrive, the Rubber
Ducky has a 55-gallon fuel tank, giving it a range of about 120 nautical miles. It has a top
GENE
WOODBURY
Stardust
MARK
BATSON
Rubber
Ducky
JoshuA Curry