on powerboats - Lowell Brothers

BOATSHOP
ON
POWERBOATS
BY ERIC SORENSEN
Maine boats that love rough water
Jamie and Joe Lowell continue a family tradition of building Down East boats used for work or pleasure
off both for the New England fishermen who have
been the core of the Maine boatbuilders’ customer
base and for the small shops like the Lowells’ that
produce their boats. Meanwhile, they’ve been getting
a few calls from West Coast fishermen and hope that
produces results in the form of firm orders.
For now, the first 38 is sold, and the brothers are
hopeful it will be the catalyst for new orders. Just a
few years ago, from 2004 to 2006, Lowell Brothers
was having a field day, with the shop pumping out
11 43-footers back to back.
helps with both efficiency and vibration. This limits
the prop inclination to just 7 degrees from the boat’s
baseline plus the running trim angle, maybe 14 degrees total, since these boats tend to run bow-high
with all that speed and lift forward.
“We keep the engine as low in the boat as possible to
lower the center of gravity and also to keep the deck
closer to the water in our workboats,” says Jamie.
“Same goes for the fuel tanks. We avoid putting in saddle tanks when we can. A big single tank can go in
lower in the boat, which also helps keep weight low.”
THE NEW DIESEL POWER
MORE BEAM, LESS WEIGHT
Tracing the development of Maine lobster boats
would be hard to do without taking into account the
impact of increasingly powerful, lighter-weight
diesels. I had a Royal Lowell-designed 42-foot Bruno
and Stillman built in 1975 with which I ran charters.
Like horsepower, beam has also increased over the
years. Like numerous production powerboats, many
Down East boats have steadily increased in beam for
their overall length, partly in reaction to market demand. People either don’t understand that greater
weighs about 1,050 pounds instead of 1,600 pounds,
and it’s as stiff as a British schoolmarm.
The weight saved not only reduces displacement,
improving both propulsion efficiency and loadcarrying capability, it also makes the boat more stable with less roll, since the weight eliminated is well
above the center of gravity. And the 38’s hull is
lighter, stiffer and stronger than the originals, since
it also has Core-Cell foam-cored construction.
The laminate starts with a Valspar BlushGuard
gelcoat, 1.5-ounce mat (they don’t own a chopper
gun), three layers of non-woven fiberglass, the core,
and three more layers of fiberglass. Each side of the
hull is laid up separately, then the two-piece mold is
joined together, and the keel area is built up to a
3/4-inch thickness of solid glass. The two-part mold
makes the hull a lot easier to lay up, and the solid
laminate down the keel area is a natural place for
A
t the Maine Boatbuilders Show in
Portland early this spring, I was
standing at an exhibitor booth
watching a video of a classic 34-foot
wooden lobster boat named Osprey
running along at about 30 knots, slicing nonchalantly through a 1-foot chop with no discernible
vertical motions.
One of the most interesting things to me, besides
how smoothly the boat was running, was how
steady the video was. It looked to me like it might
have been taken from a car driving down a causeway parallel to the boat’s course. I asked one of the
fellows at the booth how much the video camera
cost, since it obviously must have been a stabilized
model. He replied that it was a budget hand-held
with no stabilization.
How could this be possible? Well, it turns out it
was the boat that, in effect, was stabilized. The photo
boat was a Lowell Brothers 26, built by Jamie and
Joe Lowell to their Uncle Royal’s design, and built as
a Sisu 26 for years. And the vintage wooden 34-footer
in the video? Designed by the brothers’ great-grandfather Will Frost back in the 1940s. Will was also famous for his rumrunners in the 1920s and ’30s. “Brutal things with a tremendous amount of horsepower,” according to one observer.
So if you’re tired of being thrashed around in your
too-wide, too-flat, too-blunt, inefficiently powered
planing hull, there are much more seakindly alternatives. Welcome to Maine, where you just might find
the antidote you’ve been looking for.
Jamie, left, and Joe
Lowell are carrying
on a family tradition.
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LOWELL BOATS (from left):
The Lowell 43 splitpilothouse lobster boat
Provider; the newest
offering, the Lowell 38;
Timberwolf, a 35 Frost
based on a design by
Will Frost, the brothers’
great-grandfather.
This Lowell 26 combines seaworthiness
with economy and handsome lines.
The Lowell family’s roots in the Maine boatbuilding tradition run deep. Will Frost was one of the pioneers through the first half of the 20th century, designing and building everything from lobster boats
and draggers to rumrunners and commuter yachts.
Riley Lowell was his head man and son-in-law, in
that order chronologically, learning the trade and
passing the torch to his sons, Royal and Carroll Lowell, both of whom developed reputations as designers and boatbuilders.
Many of the Down East-style production boats in the water today were
designed by the Lowell brothers, including Royal’s Bruno and Stillman
fleet of 35-, 42- and 55-footers; J.C.
Boatworks’ 31 and 35; the Harris 35
and 38; the Sisu 22, 26 and 30; the
Newman 46, 38 and 30; and the
Holland 32 and 38, to name a few.
Both Lowells remained active
throughout their lives, producing
the lines that defined a wide range
of rugged working boats and yachts
from 8 to 100 feet, vessels wellregarded for their comfort and steadiness underfoot in heavy weather.
Fast forward to 2009, and we
find the Lowell legacy living on in
the form of Carroll’s sons Jamie
and Joe. Like their father before
them, the brothers grew up thor-
oughly immersed (so to speak) in boats. In 1997,
they teamed up to form Lowell Brothers (www.low
ellbrothers.com), working out of the building that
had been in the family for decades in Yarmouth,
Maine, initially making molds for other builders,
and doing repair and maintenance work.
Today, the brothers, with a five-man crew, build
custom one-off fiberglass boats — and a few of
plank-on-frame construction — but where they hope
to grow the business in the near-term is with their
production boats, for which they have built their
own tooling. Their production models include 22and 26-footers (like our photo boat) designed by
Uncle Royal, a 43-footer designed by Dad, and now
a new 38-footer that Jamie Lowell designed and are
laying up (hull No. 1).
“It’s great to be building new Lowell product
again after years of other people building my family’s designs,” Jamie says. The brothers expect to
launch the first 38 in late summer, depending on
how extensively the owner wants it outfitted.
Business has slowed of late, because of a complex
sequence of events roughly summed up as being related to a drying up of Icelandic capital (they had
their economic meltdown a year before we did),
which was used to finance a Canadian fish processing operation that, in turn, bought much of the shellfish produced in Maine. The loss of the Canadian
operation has reduced demand for fish — processing fish on this side of the border is very pricey —
which means prices have dropped and business is
As was typical for the period, she was powered by a
265-hp Detroit Diesel 6-71 with a 2-to-1 Allison gear
turning a 1.5-inch stainless-steel shaft and 26-by-26inch four-blade prop. It was a solid 12-knot boat that
burned, on average, 35 gallons in a day’s fishing —
back-to-back four- and eight-hour charter trips —
out of Rock Harbor on Cape Cod, Mass.
The boat had a beam of 13 feet, 8 inches, and the
engine weighed about 2,800 pounds. If you wanted
a speedy boat, you had to order it with a 3,300pound, 350-hp Detroit Diesel 8-71, or an equivalent
Caterpillar, and you could count on a blistering 15knot cruise, light. I mention the weight of these engines because it illustrates how much more today’s
builders have with which work. The first Lowell
Brothers 38 will have a 2,870-pound, 800-hp MAN
(about the same weight as the 6-71, but about triple
the horsepower) with a 1.75-to-1 two-speed ZF gear,
2.5-inch shaft, and a 28-by-36-inch four-blade prop.
Jamie expects more than 30 knots with the MAN,
and his experience is that economy improves with
the bigger engines at a given speed, say in the low
20-knot range. So power is a big deal, and you
have to be able to offer it to stay competitive in
this market, just like Viking Yachts couldn’t give
away one of its 40-knot 60-foot convertibles if it
only cruised at 25 knots.
In a lobster boat, the engine goes as low in the hull
as the transmission and oil pan will allow (down in
the hollow keel if it has one), which in the case of the
MAN produces a low, 7-degree shaft angle, which
beam-to-length makes a boat much less comfortable
in a seaway and less efficient for a given size (hull
volume), or they value the increased accommodations enough to overlook the drawbacks of overly
beamy boats.
In the case of commercial fishermen, they got
hooked on the increased load-carrying capacity of
beamier boats, so the average 42- or 43-footer now
has more than 15 feet of beam instead of 13 or 13.5
feet, as it was 20 or 30 years ago. The high horsepower now available is what fundamentally makes
the extra beam possible, since the diesels from a few
decades ago couldn’t make one of these newer boats
plane to save its life with half fuel and no fish on
board, never mind when loaded to the gills.
Not only are the boats beamier, including the
Lowell designs, they carry more of that beam to the
stern. Earlier designs tended to narrow up quite a
bit aft since, when running at 8 or 10 knots — about
the same speed as the inshore waves they worked in
— the stern tended to get tossed around if it was too
buoyant. Nowadays, at 25-plus knots, the boat is
largely able to control relative wave speed.
Sheer power through modern engine technology
isn’t the only thing that’s improved. For instance,
the 38’s one-piece deck/superstructure is built of
one layer of carbon fiber, wet out in epoxy resin, on
both sides of 1-inch (in the sides and trunk cabin)
and 1.5-inch (in the house top) Core-Cell coring.
This replaces the two layers of 1808 fiberglass that
would ordinarily be used, so the entire deck part
the through-hull fittings, rather than drilling
through the surrounding compressible foam core.
Vinylester resin — after epoxy, the strongest, toughest, most blister-resistant resin available — is used
throughout the laminate. (Only top-shelf production
builders use vinylester throughout.) The bulkheads
are also Core-Cell cored to save weight.
The Lowells are hard-nosed about reducing noise
and vibrations, mounting the engine on a 7-foot aluminum channel bonded to the engine bed, which itself
is part of the main hull stringers only beefed up next to
the engines. The more solid the engine beds, the more
vibrations they attenuate. Also, this design makes it
easier to install another engine later on with engine
mounts in different locations, since they’ll line right up
in a different spot along the aluminum channel.
The brothers use one mount forward and two aft
on each side to spread out the load and reduce vibrations, and the pilothouse deck is cored with 1inch Core-Cell foam, which, along with the sounddeadening materials used in the engine room, also
helps to contain engine noise.
UNDER WAY
These boats are meant to be out on the water, and
the rougher the better. Look elsewhere if a floating
gin palace floats your boat. “The idea is to get people off the mooring and out in the boat, including in
foul weather,” Jamie says. “We think it’s important
for a boat to look good sitting at the dock, but anycontinued on next page
JUNE 2009 WWW.SOUNDINGSONLINE.COM
41
BOATSHOP
ON POWERBOATS from previous page
Carroll Lowell
taught his sons to
design and build in
the methods taught
him by his father,
Riley Lowell, and
his grandfather,
Will "Pappy" Frost.
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one can design a pretty boat. What’s really important to me is how it moves through the waves, how
it sheds water.”
The Lowells take a lot of pride in how clean their
boats’ wakes are, and how easily they come up on
plane. “People will use the boat a lot more when
they find out how comfortable it is in rough water,”
says Jamie. “We love to take people out and see
their reaction running one of our boats at 20 knots in
6- to 8-footers. They are really taken aback by how
comfortable and quiet our boats are.”
Though Jamie has high hopes for the 38’s success
as a production boat, he remains a custom builder at
heart. “Building one-offs really tickles our fancy,
since we could be real creative with every boat we
built,” he says. “We also feel that a boat with the
Lowell name attached to it has a higher resale value.
The name really means something to people who
understand how well our boats do offshore in all
kinds of weather.”
For my part, it’s good to see young blood still at it
in Maine, producing updated and, in many ways,
much improved versions of the boats I grew up on. I
took a spin around Rockland Harbor the morning
after I met with the Lowells on one of their 43-footers,
this one powered by a 600-hp Deutz for a 22-knot
top end. This was a slightly larger, much faster version of my 42-foot Bruno, and the similarities were
unmistakable, including the comfortable motions,
even running at 20 knots into 3- to 5-footers rolling
in from the northeast. However, this boat is a lot
quieter with twice the horsepower. In a world that
demands wider, roomier, faster, it’s good to see that
the Lowell brothers have figured out how to deliver
the goods in a boat that’s to the ocean born. n
Eric Sorensen was founding director of the J.D. Power
and Associates marine practice and is the author of
“Sorensen’s Guide to Powerboats: How to Evaluate Design, Construction and Performance.” A longtime licensed captain, he can be reached at eric@sorensens
guide.com.