The weekend tourists who flood Whidbey Island to visit its farmers’ markets and scenic beaches are rarely aware that state-of-the art working vessel—sophisticated tugs, ferries, trawlers, fireboats and other big vessels—are being born here.
It might seem odd: quiet, rural island with one high-amp, hard-hat industry. But in fact, this setting is one key to the highly respected build quality of Nichols Brothers’ boats.
Thanks in part to the island’s unique attractions, Nichols Brothers has a remarkably large core of prodigiously skilled, experienced, and committed boatbuilders who’ve worked for the company for decades. Twenty- and thirty-year tenures are typical.
Our commitment to quality is ingrained in their culture, and their deep expertise translates into readiness to embrace whatever new challenges our customers throw their way. New marine technologies and new kinds of boats don’t scare them. They thrive on challenges.
Values are important on Whidbey Island, and the boatbuilders at Nichols Brothers invest theirs in the work they do: On time, on budget, and with immense pride in quality.
From the beginning, the Nichols men built strong, hard-working steel boats.
In 1939, George Mark Nichols, a farmer, blacksmith, and creative tinkerer, left his struggling Washington apple farm to begin a boatbuilding venture at Hood River, Oregon, on the Columbia River. Bonneville Dam had been completed just the year before, and shipping and commercial fishing on the river were primed for a boom.
Mark and his son Frank incorporated themselves as Nichols Boat Works and began crafting small tugs and trawlers. They built steel hulls from the beginning because it was what they knew—welding, not woodworking.
In 1964, Frank Nichols split off and moved to Whidbey Island, 25 miles north of downtown Seattle. The island had virtually no industry except farming, but it offered one indispensable feature: a vacant machine shop at the back of a deep-water bay. Frank moved his oversized family—wife and 11 children—to the island and began attracting new contracts for tugs and fishing boats.
Quiet, rural Whidbey Island proved to be an asset in a way Frank couldn’t have predicted.
There wasn’t an industrial waterfront culture here, teeming with salty, rough-edged characters. Instead, there were families, people accustomed to working hard and honestly, and a sense of community woven and contained by the deep moat surrounding it. This translated into a family-like culture in the shipyard, where workers helped and looked out for each other, on and off the job. Even today, employees maintain a voluntary payroll-deduction benevolent fund that quietly helps members of the shipyard family who’ve run into hard times.
Two of Frank Nichols’ sons, Matt and Archie, took over the business in 1974. The shipyard’s ambitions and capabilities rapidly grew. Modular construction techniques reduced costs. Facilities, machinery, expertise, and contracts for building boats as large as 360 feet arrived. The company diversified into building new types of vessel: everything for anyone who works, rides, or moves cargo on the water.
The most dramatic innovation grew out of Matt Nichols’ insight that there was a market in North America for a new kind of passenger vessel—light, fast, seakindly, and fuel efficient: the aluminum-hulled catamaran.
In 2008, the Texas-based investment group Ice Floe LLC purchased Nichols Brothers, but the shipyard remains firmly rooted on Whidbey Island—and in its traditions of ambitious innovation coupled with a solid, family-like company culture.
Nichols Brothers specializes in versatility. We build an astonishing variety of vessel. And we lead in adopting innovative marine technology to serve our customers’ needs.
We build monohulls and catamarans in steel and aluminum. We have built ferries designed to cross rivers at 3 knots, and a Navy transport capable of more than 50 knots. We have built boats with Z-drives, Voith Schneider propellers, and working paddlewheels. We have even built one sailboat—an extraordinarily large and impressive one.
Nichols Brothers introduced the high-speed catamaran to American waters. In 1983, an Alaska cruise company approached us with a need for an excursion vessel adapted to the unique conditions of the Yukon River: a draft of less than 6 feet, enough power to easily cruise upriver against 6- to 7-knot currents, and economical operation while carrying up to 210 passengers. Australia’s International Catamarans provided the design.
Since then, Nichols Brothers has launched 45 high-speed catamarans. Their speed, passenger comfort, and fuel efficiency adapt to a constellation of diverse uses: commercial cruise operations, diving overnighters, commuter ferries, and military troop carriers. The largest of these vessels, the 144-foot Catalina Jet, is currently in use carrying up to 450 passengers from the California mainland to Catalina Island. At 35 knots, it makes the crossing in an hour.
The U.S. Navy’s X-Craft, launched in 2005, is the most advanced vessel Nichols Brothers has yet built. It has a deceptive bargelike look—slab sides with a flat sheer and a stubble of a pilothouse poking up at its forward port corner. But it packs a prodigious powertrain: two 5,500 BHP 16-cylinder diesels for everyday cruising, and a pair of 34,000 BHP gas turbines for speeds of more than 50 knots. The flight deck accommodates two H-60 Seahawk helicopters, and the cargo deck below can transport troops, vehicles, or up to 12 cargo containers. The Navy is still evaluating projected uses, which may include battle force protection, anti-submarine warfare, amphibious assault support, and humanitarian aid.
Other unusual Nichols Brothers boats include Empress of the North, a big (360 foot) sternwheeler designed to cruise both the Columbia River and the Inside Passage between Seattle and Juneau. The functional sternwheel alone drives the boat at 6 knots, and twin Z-drives mounted just forward of the paddlewheel can power it up to 14 knots—and provide critical maneuverability in high winds and tight quarters. The Tole Mour, a three-masted, steel-hulled schooner launched in 1988, was originally commissioned as a hospital ship for the Marshall Islands. She now operates as a youth sail trainer and ocean education vessel off Southern California. With a displacement of 340 tons and sparred length of 156 feet, she is the largest active tall ship on the West Coast.
Despite these excursions into the big, fast, advanced, and exotic, Nichols Brothers still builds vessels that spring directly from its roots—honest, hard-working tugs, fireboats, dredges, barges, monohull ferries, and commercial fishing boats. What we’ve learned from the most challenging projects improves even the most modest boats.
Every commercial boat comes with a unique set of requirements for its specialized job and the environment in which it operates. We draw on deep experience to tailor each vessel perfectly for its work, whatever and wherever in the world it is.
Nichols Brothers employees who’ve worked at the island shipyard for more than 30 years say they can sum up the company in one word: fair. Fair to its own people, to its customers, to its community.
When the Whidbey Island Rowing Association needed storage for its shells, Nichols Brothers provided a site to build a secure shelter.
When a young orca was orphaned and abandoned in Puget Sound, Nichols Brothers donated a crew and one of its high-speed catamarans to reunite the 1,350-pound whale with its pod in British Columbian waters.
When Nichols Brothers planned an expansion in 2006, several agencies and interest groups expressed concern about possible impacts on the environment and the residential community of Freeland, which had mushroomed around the shipyard since 1964. Nichols Brothers hired a team of consultants to alleviate its impact, including a $2 million stormwater filtration system that pipes runoff cleaner than the municipal water supply to the adjacent wetland.
The long-held commitment to being fair pays back. In 1979, when the shipyard itself ran perilously short of cash, Whidbey Islanders dug into their own pockets and came up with $600,000 to help Nichols Brothers with a bridge loan. It was repaid, with interest.
We’ve earned an even stronger endorsement from our customers: repeat business.
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Nichols Brothers Boat Builders is a thoroughly modern enterprise, fully at home in the 21st century. But there are certain values rooted in the past, qualities such as responsibility, care, and pride in our work, that we preserve as a vital part of who we are.
