37 Clockwise from top: Knit Wits, the first Hatteras Yacht built by Willis Slane, was hauled by truck from High Point to the North Carolina coast for final assembly and launch. Flybridge installation and final assembly take place before Knit Wits was launched. From left, Willis Slane, Doris Slane, Earl Phillips and North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges were present for the launch in Morehead City in 1960. Slane was only 10 when his father passed, and Hatteras Yachts was sold soon after. But years later, after he restored an older Hatteras for himself, another owner of the same model was impressed enough to order his own restoration. Hatteras took note as well, and featured Slane’s projects in its owner newsletter, which generated more restoration work. Through 30 years of rebuilding classic yachts, designing and building a boat of his own was always a thought in the back of his mind, and today Slane Marine is nearing completion of hull No. 1 of the Slane 62-foot convertible under construction. The company is using space in the High Point facilities used by Hatteras until 1998, when it consolidated its operations into its New Bern headquarters. Randy Ramsey has a similar story about the origins of his busi-ness. He was charter fishing in the 1980s when he set out to build a boat of his own. “I always knew that I wanted to do something different, some-thing a little more stylish, and what I thought would be better in the ocean for charter fishing,” he says. “I turned to a guy I’d fished with named Omie Tillett. … Like me, he was a charter captain who made his living on the ocean, and he was always try-ing to change his boats and make them a little better. So when PHOTOS COURTESY OF SLANE FAMILY ARCHIVES I got ready to build my first boat, I reached out to him to try to build a boat that was very similar to the one that he was running. We built Sensation, which was our first boat, and is still operat-ing on the Morehead City waterfront, charter fishing every day. He helped us, and made a big impact on how our boats are.” While building Sensation, another charter captain asked Ramsey to build a second boat. He agreed to work on that next boat — when he wasn’t fishing. Those two boats led to more orders, and by the early ’90s, he says he had to drop charter fishing and focus full-time on boat building to keep up. Today, Jarrett Bay Boatworks services about 1,000 boats per year at its boatyard and has four large sport fishing boats under construction, including a 90-foot battlewagon with six staterooms and five heads. www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
Wrightsville Beach Magazine May 2015
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