History in the Making

Andy Tyska, the new owner of Huckins Yachts, says the past will drive a future of new models and a whole lot more

Andy Tyska sat alone in the room, trying to reconcile the weight of the past with everyone’s hopes for the future. He had just finished a meeting about his company, Bristol Marine, acquiring the storied boatbuilder Huckins Yachts. Everyone else had left, giving him a chance to think. He’d been using a desk that was moved into the office of Huckins president Cindy Purcell, the third-generation owner of the company that her grandfather founded in 1928. And now, before him, Tyska had a leather-covered binder full of vintage marketing materials and letters from Frank Pembroke Huckins himself, curated by Purcell from her personal files.

Tyska took a breath and opened the binder, carefully turning every delicate page. “It made me realize I have a lot to learn, and that there’s a Huckins voice that is so definable as it relates to the product,” he says. “It’s pretty cool to have that front-row seat.”

In late September, when Bristol Marine and Huckins announced the acquisition plans, the 52-year-old Tyska got bombarded by calls and emails. Many were congratulatory, and some expressed concern. Huckins boat owners wanted to learn about him and his plans for their beloved brand. Since then, Tyska has been showing them who he is. He’s taking meetings, such as a recent one with a Huckins boat owner who toured Bristol Marine’s facilities in late October. 

“As soon as they walk into the yard, they see Aphrodite sitting here, put away for the winter. They see a 1911 restored tender. They see Black Watch, a 1930s vintage sailing yacht by Sparkman & Stephens. They see a Trumpy. They see these boats in our facility, and it’s kind of a no-brainer where they realize this is the right fit,” he says. “People also asked me, ‘Are you going to build boats again?’ Based on conversations so far with owners, and excitement and interest, we’re already well along with conceptual designs for a new Huckins.”

A Lifetime of Preparation

Tyska grew up in Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb, as the youngest of five kids who all wanted passions that felt like their own. The family waterskied and sailed on small lakes, and water ended up being his muse. He also liked math and engineering. “I stumbled on this thing called naval architecture,” he says, recalling how he ended up in Ann Arbor, Mich., studying toward a degree.

During his junior year in college, he was required to do an internship. “Many of my classmates were going to work for Exxon or Chevron or big shipbuilders,” he says. “I got a copy of SAIL magazine and wrote letters — before email, imagine that — to every builder and designer that was in the directory they published once a year.” In response, Tyska received an avalanche of rejection letters. There was also a single voice mail, from a man named Halsey Herreshoff. He was the grandson of legendary yacht designer Nathanael Herreshoff, and an America’s Cup sailor during the 12-Metre era. He was establishing the America’s Cup Hall of Fame at Herreshoff Marine Museum.

“Halsey left me a voice mail message and said, ‘Why don’t you come help me design boats in Bristol, Rhode Island?’” Tyska says. “Well, that never happened, but I learned how to varnish and paint.”

After the internship, Tyska went back to college in the Midwest, where all his classmates were returning with impressive reports and engineering projects they’d completed. Varnishing and painting didn’t seem to measure up, until Tyska thought about what had been going on all around him. “I realized, just through being at the museum and working with Halsey, that I had met some interesting people,” he says. “Eric Goetz, who was building America’s Cup defenders. Merrifield and Roberts. Barrett Holby. Dennis Conner would come sailing on the New York 30.” Tyska set up interviews with them all. He asked them what made a good boatbuilder successful. 

“That was my internship. Doing that deepened my connections and opened some doors,” he says. “That gave me the comfort level to reach out to Ted Hood after I graduated and say, ‘I want to work for you.’” But that call didn’t go so well.

“He promptly said, ‘Not a chance,’” Tyska recalls. “‘You’re a college kid with an engineering degree,’ and that’s not what he was. He was the ultimate tinkerer, a learn-as-you-go guy. After weekly check-ins for three months, he said, ‘I’ll hire you for less than minimum wage.’”

That was enough for Tyska. He moved to Bristol after graduation in 1994 along with three other naval architects. They worked on establishing their own design office by night, while working for more established outfits by day. “Ted Hood was right there,” he says. “When I was hired, it was probably eight or 10 designers. After a year, for market reasons, it went down to three: Ted Fontaine, Matt Smith and me, because I was the cheap guy.” Hood would draw boat designs by hand, and then Smith and Tyska would feed them into a computer. Hood would then mark up the result, and they’d all chat about it. “That was when he introduced the Whisperjet series, right after the Ted Hood 51 sailboat,” Tyska says. 

In 1998, Tyska saw an advertisement about a yard in Bristol going up for auction. It became his first Bristol Marine location, a single DIY waterfront workshop. It was followed by two more full-service yards. He acquired the Somerset, Massachusetts, facility in 2012, and the Boothbay Harbor, Maine, location in 2017. And then, in late 2024, the Huckins yard in Jacksonville, Florida. Tyska was realizing his mission of delivering superior service with a team of reputable professionals who love fixing boats.

“For the past 25-plus years, I’ve focused on building a business that now spans three facilities, and soon to be four, that’s rooted in recognizing the past and investing in the future,” Tyska says. “Never before with the other three acquisitions have we been presented with the kind of opportunity that we have with Huckins. So for me, it’s how we stitch together the yards and define who we are and what we do.”

Looking Back to Move Ahead

The purchase of Huckins, Tyska says, led him to reimagine Bristol Marine overall. For years, he’s been involved with the marine trades association in Rhode Island, learning about the need to protect, and invest in, traditional boatbuilding facilities and skilled craftspeople. He’s also spent a good bit of time around the corner from his yard in Bristol, at the Coggeshall Farm Museum. It’s a living-history setup that recreates the experience of tenant farmers on a salt marsh farm.

“I got involved with all of that as a volunteer, and got on the board, and it really helped me find my voice when it comes to historic preservation,” Tyska says. “It’s partly my love for old stuff—not just boats. Also cars, tractors, all that stuff.”

With Huckins now on his mind, too, he realized that he could rebrand his existing yards to better reconnect with their pasts. He was renaming every location he owns as the Huckins deal closed. The Bristol location, for instance, was previously known as Bristol Yachts. “They built and delivered semi-custom sailboats and powerboats that were designed by pre-eminent designers like Herreshoff, Ted Hood and Carl Alberg,” Tyska says. But before that, it was called Wardwell’s Boatyard in the early 1900s. It serviced yachts and tenders for local boaters, he says: “Many of the people who had their boats built at the Herreshoff yard got their service at Wardwell’s.”

That’s why Wardwell’s Boatyard will be the new name of his yard in Bristol. Similarly, in Somerset, the yard he owns today was once a popular place for Native Americans. Shipbuilding thrived there in the late 1880s, when the location was known as Bowers Shipyard. It built three-masted wooden schooners. And so, Bowers Shipyard will be the new name of his Somerset location. The Boothbay Harbor yard is going to be renamed Sample’s Shipyard, in honor of Frank Sample, who once built a line of Down East cruisers there. Huckins will be the fourth, with the name, of course, remaining Huckins.

“I think there’s a thread that sews together these yards, protecting the past and investing in the future,” Tyska says. “What a lot of people are seeing is corporatization. They want consistency and continuity in visual presence at multiple facilities. Well, we’re not really putting dots on a map. We’re drawing unique pictures in multiple places on the map and connecting them together.”

Future Plans

The next question everyone asks is what will be happening at all these shipyards. For starters, he says, all three of the New England yards are working on the Bristol 30, an outboard-powered Downeast-style boat with an LOA near 35 feet. “It’s an evolution of the Southport 30 that was designed and built by David Nutt, a well-regarded local boatbuilder from the Boothbay Region in Maine,” says Tyska. “This is the second boat in the series, and it’s the first time our team has built a new boat for the recreational market. However, many of our team members have worked on several new build projects in their careers.”

While the yards are known mostly for service, refit and repair, they have produced three of these builds to date. Hull No. 1 went to a cruising couple based in Niantic, Connecticut. Hull No. 2 recently launched and is bound for a boater in Boothbay Harbor who commutes to an island, intends to fish offshore for tuna, and wants to help artists discover Maine’s coastline from the water. “Between the first boat and the second, every yard has had something to do with (the 30),” Tyska says. “And they’ve all had lessons learned, which forces us to communicate and share those lessons, from our carpenters to our composite technicians to our metal fabricators.”

Hull No. 3 is currently for sale. The hull is built, and it’s a blank canvas. “It could really be a lot of things,” he says. “If someone doesn’t come to the table sooner rather than later, I might just build it the way I think it should be built.” His idea is for a boat that his team can use: “I would imagine more of a dayboat style. Maybe a walkaround boat with a different deck layout. Less overnighting.”

As for Huckins, Tyska plans to create a museum within the shipyard, showcasing the brand’s legacy — similar to an in-yard museum he created in Boothbay Harbor, working with Evelyn Ansell from the Herreshoff Marine Museum. “She came up and curated the story of Sample Shipyard in Boothbay Harbor, where we documented its timeline,” Tyska says. “We have artifacts, memorabilia, bottles of champagne that were provided at commissioning. It’s my intention to do a similar effort at Huckins. Already, many of the designs have been digitized, but it’s my intention to make all those resources — the designs, the patterns — accessible remotely and also in person, so people can come and see and touch the stuff.”

There also will be plenty of Huckins refit and repair work, along with new boats. The first new Huckins model will be an evolution of the Sportsman 38 with outboard power. 

“The current 38 is an incredible boat with a wonderful galley and convertible island queen,” Tyska says. “We’re going to focus more on dayboat outdoor cruising, with a lot of living space up on the bow for socializing, but still having a queen berth down below. We’ll have a galley up in the cockpit. It’s going to look very much like a Huckins.”

There also are plans on the drawing board for more of the Atlantic 44, possibly as a semi-custom design with a bigger production schedule. “The Atlantic 44 is a tried-and-true design,” he says. “They’ve done, I think, 18 versions of that boat. It’s easily driven, it gets up on plane at low speeds, it’s comfortable and quiet. There’s a lot of opportunities to work with that platform.”

Tyska says he’s also talking with two other New England facilities about how they might preserve those heritages, as part of the overall history and future of boatbuilding.

“There are some brands out there that have been acquired and shelved, too, which is also something we’re talking about — not necessarily to dust them off and build more boats, but we’re interested in how can we keep those brands in the forefront of people’s minds when it comes to yachting, instead of just being displaced by brands that have become more popular,” he says. “How can you preserve those brands in yachting history? 

“I think there’s also opportunities that are not geography-related or workforce related, but there’s a lot of specialty businesses with skilled technicians that we’re interested in working with, not just as collaborators, but as partners,” he adds. “Maybe they’re focused on systems, or painting, or varnishing. We’re interested in putting together a network of service marine providers, not just under the Bristol Marine brand, but those smaller providers that have years of hard-earned knowledge.”

Beyond that, Tyska says, he’ll see what comes through the door. It could be anything or anyone, like the person who recently called to ask if he could use a ship saw. 

“That’s a unique tool, able to cut 6-inch frames for a tall ship schooner,” he says. “I said, ‘Maybe, who else are you calling?’ And he said, ‘We sat down and figured out how many people could use it.’ Besides Mystic Seaport, us and Boston Marine Railway, maybe somebody on the Chesapeake —  what we’re doing is special.”