(Editor’s note: This is the 27th installment in a monthly series highlighting some of the region’s unsung manufacturers that make products essential to the economy and, in many cases, our way of life. See previous installments here.)
Growing up, sisters Marcia and Julie Blount recall watching as their father, Luther Blount, sketched out boat designs on a napkin over lunch, adding in features as clients described the type of vessel they needed.
Those drawings would later come to life before their eyes at Blount Boats Inc., the shipyard their father founded in Warren in 1949.
Now, the sisters helm the family business, this year celebrating its 75th anniversary.
“Because we run boats, we have a lot of practical solutions for boats,” said Marcia Blount, company president and chief financial officer.
Julie Blount serves as executive vice president and human resources manager.
Steps away from the town’s waterfront, which is known for its restaurants and small businesses, the 6-acre Blount shipyard at 461 Water St. boasts a markedly different, but no less lively, energy.
Here, sparks of glowing metal crackle in the air around welding tools, and workers traverse the skeletons of upcoming Blount vessels, such as a canal tugboat that the manufacturer is assembling for the New York Power Authority. The 65-foot steel tugboat – one of four commissioned by the New York agency – is one of the two or three boats that the manufacturer, which has about 50 employees, typically completes per year.
The tug is a “little workhorse” of a vessel, Marcia Blount said, designed for tasks such as placing and retrieving buoys, pushing barges and breaking ice along a 524-mile canal network.
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TAKING SHAPE: Sisters Julie Blount, left, executive vice president and human resources manager, and Marcia Blount, president and chief financial officer, with The Gardner, a 100-foot crew transfer vessel under construction that will be used during offshore wind development projects, at the Blount Boats Inc. shipyard in Warren.
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But other boats the shipyard built its name on serve contrasting markets, such as faster, more stable aluminum dinner cruise boats like the Bay Queen, for instance, which carried hundreds of passengers at a time throughout Narragansett Bay in the 1970s through the 2000s.
The sisters trace the origin of these boats back to their childhood, when the family would cruise up the coast of Maine and Canada on Blount-built boats with friends who enjoyed it so much that they said they would be willing to pay for such an experience.
Later, passengers would say the Blount cruises were like “cruising on your friend’s yacht,” Julie Blount said, describing vessels like the Bay Queen as just one of “several iconic boats that launched businesses” in a variety of niches the manufacturer carved out for itself.
Blount has since discontinued cruise boat manufacturing, though some of these vessels remain in operation. But the business has shifted to focus on a relatively new sector.
Just as they watched boats transform from rough sketches into reality, the Blount sisters have long had a front row seat to an ever-evolving ship industry, which in recent decades has given rise to demand for offshore wind crew transport vessels.
The company’s push into offshore wind has taken place entirely under the sisters’ leadership, as the now-burgeoning renewable energy sector wasn’t yet a speck on the horizon at the time of the business’s founding. Luther Blount died in 2006, a few years before the sisters saw the offshore wind vessel industry take off around 2010.
The sisters saw an immediate opportunity for the company in the rise of the offshore wind industry. Calling for vessels of around 80-100 feet in length, which describes a typical Blount boat, coupled with an ideal location, offshore wind seemed like a natural fit for the manufacturer’s next step.
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SPARKS FLY: Julio De Carvalho, welder subcontractor, works on a boat at the Blount Boats Inc. shipyard in Warren.
PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
The company had a solid foundation to work from, even in the relatively new industry. Many of the business’s early vessels, which were typically sent to the Gulf of Mexico, were precursors to modern offshore wind vessels, the sisters say.
Within years of Blount’s modern-day pivot, the company built and launched the Atlantic Pioneer. True to its name, the vessel servicing the Block Island Wind Farm offshore energy development was the first U.S.-built wind farm crew transfer vessel.
Blount Boats continues to cater to this industry, with current commissions that include offshore wind vessels for Orsted A/S, which is developing three offshore wind farms in Northeast waters that are slated to generate a total of 1,760 megawatts of power for Rhode Island, Connecticut and New York.
Even as Blount Boats develops innovative solutions, finding appropriately skilled workers has become an increasingly prominent challenge over the years, the sisters say, though they’ve had success in recruiting students from places such as William M. Davies Jr. Career & Technical High School and New England Institute of Technology.
The company tends to attract a type of employee who is “just as bright as any college graduate, but their choice is not to sit behind a desk,” Marcia Blount said. “Those are the kinds of jobs we offer.”
Each boat is special, she said, adding to this appeal. The vessels are not just “widgets,” she said, but “big things with names and personalities.”
