Without the Dana family, there probably would be no Newport Shipyard today.
In 1998, the shipyard was bankrupt and on the auction block when the Dana family became majority owners by outbidding a developer who wanted to put time-share residences along the waterfront, according to Charlie Dana, shipyard co-owner. The business today is the last of what used to be five shipyards in Newport.
The place was a mess when the family acquired it. Not even one yacht was docked there. “We didn’t make any money for five years,” Dana said. “We had to clean up the place and we had to build a clientele.”
Now, employees at the bustling shipyard are working to prepare for a major event that will take place there June 15-19, the J-Class Regatta, sponsored by Sail Newport and featuring some of the largest racing yachts ever built, organizers have said.
This event will bring back to the City by the Sea the mammoth Class J mega-yachts that were introduced and raced in the America’s Cup in the 1930s, when Newport hosted the Cup races. Three of the original 10 J-Class yachts have signed on for the regatta, with plans in the works to add a fourth. About 30 crew members accompany each vessel.
“The owners of these great boats are choosing to come to Newport for this race,” said Brad Read, executive director of Sail Newport, a business based at Fort Adams State Park that provides sailing lessons for all ages and sponsors sailing events.
To illustrate how large the vessels are, Jock West of Regatta Partners Inc. in Newport, an agency that is in charge of promoting the J-Class regatta, said the top of the boats barely can clear the Pell bridge, leaving just 12 feet of clearance.
The shipyard, Dana explained, will be the home base of operations for the mega-yachts. The boats will be housed at the shipyard and Dana expects that the crew members will be lodged nearby in separate accommodations. “Sailing people like to be with each other and near their boats,” he said. “We’ll also try to show them [visiting crews] around Rhode Island a little bit.”
The business does not build boats, but houses, repairs and maintains both commercial and private vessels. Some private vessels, while owned by an individual or a company, are actually similar to a small business because the owners charter them out, Dana noted. “We have a constant work list,” he said. “A boat spends 10 percent of its value in maintenance every year.”
The shipyard certainly has a positive impact on the local economy, according to the owner. “The rule of thumb,” Dana said, is that every dollar spent at the shipyard “is turned over seven times in the community,” in general generating $7 in indirect but related services.
The shipyard also has an in-house restaurant run by the Dana family, a store specializing in nautical equipment and rents on-site office space to maritime industries such as yacht designers and marine engineers.
Besides Charlie Dana, other family members involved in daily operations are his wife, Rose, his son, Eli, who is dock manager, and daughter, Isabella. He credits Eli with building up the shipyard’s clientele over the years because, he said, “in this business, all these boats are globe-trotting, so you have to build a relationship with each boat and each owner, one at a time.”
In a development Dana called “very recent,” he said the shipyard plans to start sponsoring more sailing events than in the past, preferably world-class events. “Advertising is so expensive, we believe our money can be better used to help events come to Rhode Island,” he said. •
