Lou Codega started his career in naval architecture with the Coast Guard and U.S. Navy, but it was his work with offshore fishboat builder Regulator that elevated his status among boaters. The first model he drew for Owen and Joan Maxwell, the Regulator 26, set the standard for many offshore fishing boats that would follow it.
Codega has since designed every Regulator that rolls off the factory floor, and of course there is more to his career than his design work for one builder. Today, he’s eyeing retirement after designing everything from trawlers to record-breaking megayachts and just about everything in between.
We sat down with Codega in early November to discuss design trends that have had a major impact on the boating market during his 50-year career, ideas that he considers to be merely fads, and where he sees boat design headed in the future. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Your interest in boating started when you were young, fostered by an uncle, right?
Yes. He was a farm boy from Oklahoma and needed a job, so he basically walked to the recruiting office and joined the Navy in the 1930s. He was inside the USS Maryland at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, when it was bombed, and served through World War II and Korea. And then he retired to Barrington, R.I., where I grew up. So he was the one who got me into boating.
My uncle had a small skiff that I used to run, and he tried to teach me to sail, but I eventually knew more than he did. I was splicing three-strand by the time I was 8, but he taught me the knots and all that stuff. I was kind of like the kid he never had, so he was the one that really got me into boating.
How did your interest in boats lead to a career in design?
When I was in high school, I had an appointment to the Naval Academy. I was just about to go there and failed a depth-perception test, so they rejected me. That’s when I scrambled around at the last minute looking for something to do. I went to Providence College in Providence, R.I., for a year and eventually realized I was spending more time playing ping-pong with pretty girls than going to classes. That wasn’t a good use of my time, so I learned about the Webb Institute in Glen Cove, N.Y. I’d always been kind of interested in boating, and I was thinking I might go into oceanography or marine engineering. I went there the next year.
How was your experience at Webb and after college?
I was on the Webb sailing team and things like that. My thinking when I got out of Webb was that I was going to be a great sailboat designer. Unfortunately, the economy kind of sunk, and there just weren’t any jobs. After I graduated, I went to work for the Coast Guard for six, seven years. It was a fantastic experience.
Three or four of those years, I was working in the First District up in Boston, helping with repair work. That was a lot of fun, and it taught me a lot. You go into shipyards and solve problems, and communicate with the guys doing the work, and talk about welding and how are you going to fix things. All really good stuff for a naval architect to know.
By that time, I had gotten married, and my wife, Robin, was transferred down to Norfolk, Va. I started looking around for jobs in town and found the Navy’s Combatant Craft Engineering Department, which at the time did lots of boat designing. This is when Don Blount was there, and guys like Steve Denny — all the old-timers — were there. I went to work for them, and that was really the first time I got paid to design boats. It got me into a lot of yards, and I got to meet a lot of people.
Was it around this time that you met Owen and Joan Maxwell, who were getting Regulator up and running?
Yes. I was still working for the Navy at the time. Blount and I had a little part-time gig on the side. One of the guys was working for Albemarle doing their early designs. This was like 1988. Joan and Owen had decided start Regulator at that time, and they approached this other guy, Bob Hamilton, because they knew him. They knew his involvement with Albemarle, and they approached Bob to do the design work for Regulator, and he declined. He thought it was a conflict of interest.
We were living in Norfolk at the time, and Joan and Owen came up to visit at our house one evening. We sat around and talked. They showed me some ideas about what they were interested in, and I said yeah, I certainly was interested in helping them. And at the time, most of the stuff I was doing was Special Operations boats for the Navy, so I really couldn’t tell them anything other than, “I know how to do this.”
I’m looking on YouTube now, and you can see everything that I did, but at the time it was all highly classified. I told them, “Yeah, I could do high-speed boats. That’s not a problem. I don’t know much about fishing, but that’ll be what you tell me to do.” We started sending sketches and drawings back and forth. Owen showed up with a pile of ideas and ad clippings and pictures of things that he had seen that he liked and things that he didn’t like, and the Regulator 26 came out of that.
What was it like designing that first Regulator and getting it into production, and which elements were intrinsically yours?
Owen and Joan towed that boat around for about two-and-a-half, maybe three years before they finally got hull No. 1 off the ground. Money was tight in those days. I always sound so obnoxious when I say stuff like this, but Mako, SeaCraft and Pursuit, and all the builders who were competing in that market — those were pretty decent boats. So why would anyone want to buy a boat from these upstarts from North Carolina? It took awhile for them to get traction, but they stuck with it.
At the time, most of the competition was designing from worked-over raceboats or scaled-down raceboats, and that’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted to do something that was seaworthy, reliable and safe, and able to run in pretty much any weather. I always look through the local fishing boats of the area, and there’s a lot of Carolina styling in that boat, and it’s for good reasons. Like the high bow, the flare … all of those design elements serve a purpose.
Joan and Owen and I had this conversation very early on. We wanted something that looked like a fishing boat that was going to look good for the next 40 years, and there really hasn’t been too many others like it. Like I said, the flare works, the high bow works, the low transom works, and all of those elements work well and look good.
You’ve said you wouldn’t design an offshore boat with a stepped hull. Since then, designer Michael Peters has done some remarkable things with his Stepped-V Ventilated Tunnel hull. Have you changed your mind?
Michael knows what he’s doing, and I don’t, so far as stepped hulls go. I think there’s still some trade-offs. I think they’ve improved a lot. I haven’t run one, but I’ve never heard anything bad about them. Let me back up. I think it’s probably still a trade-off. I don’t really object to a stepped hull like I used to because I think Michael has refined it to the point where my concerns have gone away. I think it’s a choice now. I kind of suspect they still don’t back down as well as a deep-vee, and at low speeds they probably don’t behave as well as a deep-vee, but if somebody came to me looking for one, I wouldn’t talk him out of it. I would say, “Go talk to Michael.” I’ve done that. I don’t know if he knows, but I’ve done that several times because I’m too old. Old dogs and new tricks and all that.
What design and building trends have excited you in the past five to 10 years?
Every time you turn around, somebody’s doing something better with outboards. I think the advent of high-horsepower outboards has brought the biggest and most profound changes to boat design. Think back 40 years ago. Who would’ve thought that you would have a bunch of 600-hp outboards on a boat? Certainly not me.
I also think the structures are getting better, and builders are using more reliable construction techniques. The vacuum-bagging and the infusion, which 20 years ago were reserved for raceboats or high-performance sailboats, are more common today, and boats are generally better off for it.
It’s great that designers are drawing boats that are a little more versatile, like designs an owner can use for a lot of different things. Maybe it’s not a 100% fishing boat, but it’s 90% fishing boat, 10% cruising boat and so on. Lastly, I don’t really see the stepped hulls that Michael is doing as something I wouldn’t. I think that’s a huge improvement over what we had 20 years ago, or 30, certainly 40 years ago.
How about electric boats. The battery problem seems to keep them a niche product.
Absolutely. That’s totally the issue. Until there’s a breakthrough in battery technology, I agree. No one’s going to develop batteries for boats. But maybe it is in everybody’s interest to have a lighter battery. So whether it comes from automotive or perhaps from the aviation community, that’s what must happen — a breakthrough in the battery technology.
Right now, it’s a very niche market. You kind of look at some of these numbers and say, “Well, why in the world does anybody want a boat that you can only use for an hour?” Or an hour-and-a-half or two hours or whatever. It’s a big difference when a boat is running at 70% or 80% power all the time, where a car is running at 10% or 15% power.
Do you see a place for hybrid propulsion in recreational boats?
Eight or nine years ago, I almost got involved in a program with Siemens, the German company. They had this idea that they were going to put hybrid power on everything in the world. It wasn’t an all-in-one solution, though — that would be silly. One of the ideas we were kicking around was to take a cruising boat and do a hybrid solution there. I thought that idea had a lot of merit because you would have a number of generators — two, three, whatever. And you basically have the same system that they use on a cruise ship. Generators make electricity, then distribute it to propulsion motors or wherever the ship needs it. And the technology is there to do that.
And again, it would be a niche market, but I think a lot of cruising boats, like a Nordhavn-style trawler, could probably benefit from something like that. It’s pretty much automated at this point. Engines turn on, engines turn off, and the system would be smart enough to put equal hours on all your engines and so. I’m a little disappointed somebody hasn’t followed up on that idea.
You’ve been collaborating with Composite Yacht in Trappe, Md., on some designs derived in part from Chesapeake Bay deadrise workboats. What can you tell us about those projects?
The CY 55 is done, and we’re doing a CY 50 and CY 39, as well. I’ve always liked the style, especially in Smithfield, Va., where you’d go out on the water during the week and the deadrises would always be out there doing their work. I’ve never liked them from the chine down, though. The good thing about commercial fishermen is that they know what works, and the boats are adapted to where they work and how they work. The bad thing is that they don’t change with technology. Those boats were great 30 or 40 or 50 years ago with low power. And if you still run them with low power, they’re great boats, but there’s nothing about the CY 55 from the chine down that’s a deadrise.
I understand that the CY 55’s owner had speed goals in mind with 2,000 hp.
It’s a performance boat from the chine down. And the styling is the styling. That’s what the man likes, and it’s what I like. I was happy to do it for him. The problem is, the goals changed. We went into the project with 50 mph as the goal. The owner is a great guy. He told us what he wanted, and he was very willing to pay for it and basically stayed out of our way. The perfect owner. I said, “OK, it’s 50. Yeah, we could do that.” I kind of went through the numbers, and it turned out that I thought 52½, 53 was pretty reasonable. And then he said, “Well, how about 55? It’s kind of a nice number.”
I said, “I don’t know. We’re obviously going to do our best to hit it, to make the boat go as fast as it can. But I don’t think 55 is realistic.” And we actually did it. I have a picture someplace of 54.9 mph on the screen. So we came pretty close, but it’s all in the details.
It’s not so much difficult from an engineering standpoint, except that it’s a single-minded determination that has to go through the whole project with everybody involved. The structures guy has to be able to figure out what you need and where, and let’s not put in anything else. If the owner doesn’t want it, it doesn’t go in. If the owner wants it and it’s too heavy or it’s going to hurt something, sit down and talk with him, and it doesn’t go in. It was a wonderful engineering project, but it was the details and the little stuff and all that, that made the project work.
Your son followed in your footsteps, so to speak. How’s his design career going?
He was working for Doug Zurn for a time. He just finished getting his master’s in naval architecture up in Michigan, and he’s working for a company out on the West Coast in the Bay Area called Wam-V. It’s kind of an interesting gig. They do autonomous and remote-control catamarans. They use the vessels for seismic surveys, video surveys, surveillance.
You hinted at retirement the last time we spoke. Are you still planning on winding down?
Well, yes and no. Yeah, you’re right about me retiring. I’m finishing up the two boats for Composite Yacht, as I mentioned. And unless something really, really interesting comes along, that’s going to be it. But right now, I’m turning everything down. And as they progress with the build, there’s less and less work for me to do. So I’m kind of taking afternoons off, and Robin and I are taking two-week road trips and stuff like that. I’m kind of already there.
What projects are you most proud of?
Destriero was the big boat I did when I was working with Blount, and there were a lot of people involved in it. That was a 220-foot aluminum boat that still holds the trans-Atlantic speed records. The list of firsts on that boat is probably as long as your arm. Largest, fastest, biggest, stuff like that.
The Regulator 26 has got to be up there, mostly because of Joan and Owen. There was a lot of stuff that is now kind of standard on center consoles and sportfishing boats across the market that were considered too expensive or unnecessary back then. Today, many of those features found in the Regulator 26 are standard because of the things Regulator has pioneered. Their impact on the market is undeniable.
What would you tell someone who has a passion for boats and wants to make a living designing them?
I’ll tell you what I told my son, James. He went to Webb completely on his own decision. I claim no responsibility for it. But if somebody were to come to me and say, “I want to be a naval architect,” I’d say, “Go get a degree. And get a degree in naval architecture. Either go to Webb or Michigan, but you have to get a degree. Otherwise, there’s really no viable career path for you.” I mean, you can go work for a boatyard or you can go do modeling for some design office or something like that, but you’re going to be working for other people doing their designs.
This part, I did tell James. I said: “If you wake up every morning and the only thing you want to do is design boats, then that’s what you should do. If you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I could be happy doing something else,’ go do something else and make some for-real money and go buy your own boats.” And that’s kind of where I am now in my career. I wake up in the morning, and that fire is gone. I want to go fishing and road trips or go for walks and things like that. Those are the things that do it for me today.
This article was originally published in the December 2023 issue.
