Kvichak Marine Industries Inc. (Seattle)

Left to right: Kvichak Marine’s Brian Thomas, Jim Meckley and Keith Whittemore.

“We know everything we build is a workboat,” Kvichak Marine Industries says on its website. The recession notwithstanding, being a versatile builder of aluminum workboats instead of pleasure craft or yachts has been a good place to be lately.

Kvichak, with 226 employees, is nothing if not versatile. It was founded in the early 1980s in a garage by three commercial fishermen—Jim Meckley, Keith Whittemore and Brian Thomas—who wanted to make sails for racing boats. Now, Kvichak turns out aluminum passenger ferries, fishing boats, whale-watching catamarans, pilot boats, even hovercraft. Five years ago, it bought Marco Pollution Control, a designer and manufacturer of oil-spill recovery equipment, to broaden its line of response boats.

A more recent project is Kvichak’s partnering with a Wisconsin boatyard that bid on and won the Response Boat-Medium contract, an effort by the U.S. Coast Guard to update and standardize its fleet of utility boats. Kvichak established a division in Kent to build the 45-foot boats; the team has so far delivered 20 boats at about $2 million each and expects to deliver 30 more in the next 12 months, and the overall contract could include as many as 250 vessels.

A growing concern for those who buy boats is emissions. Kvichak is working to green up its boats by incorporating post-combustion treatment systems to hold emissions below EPA requirements. Such systems have been incorporated in Kvichak’s latest contracts, four high-speed catamarans for San Francisco Bay, and three all-weather pilot boats to operate in ports along the coast of the Netherlands.

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