Huckins

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Photo by: Anders Johnson

Very few yacht builders can include a depression and a world war in their histories. There are even fewer in which the founding family has managed to keep sawing wood throughout. In fact, only one comes to my mind — Huckins Yacht. How is this possible given the fragile economy of boatbuilding? Cindy Purcell will tell you it’s all about family and her grandfather, the yard’s founder, Frank Pembroke Huckins.

The title of Huckins’ memoir, Boats and Women: The History of My Life, offers a sense of the man’s wit. “Granddaddy tended to ‘say it like it was’ before it was the fashion,” said Purcell, who now runs the yard with her husband, Buddy. It was his persistence, however, that served him best. It took the patina of two marriages before he met his match and several successes and failures in business before he focused on his life’s passion — boats.



Born in east Boston in 1886, Huckins credited his father (a lumberyard owner) for his business instinct and his mother for his creativity. Huckins claimed that he pedaled his lathe “several times around the world” and that neighborhood kids wondered what “Huck the cellar boy” was up to. Huckins built a rowboat at age 12 and by age 15 was operating what he described as “a water taxi service for the lovelorn.” One of his creations, a small brass cannon, almost caused his expulsion from Harvard. “Granddaddy fired the cannon from his dorm room window and it flew out, just missing his professor on the street below,” Purcell explained.

Huckins was a lackluster student; however, his mechanical ability impressed professor Lionel S. Marks, author of The Mechanical Engineer’s Manual — the bible of the breed. Huckins credited Marks with teaching him the skills to imagine, research and create. Huckins left school to work in the lumberyard for a dollar a day, and when his father passed away he took charge — he was just 20. After selling the family business, Huckins cruised a 38-foot displacement design he had built to Florida, where he invested in a lumber mill that became home to the Florida Fairform Finish — precursor to his Fairform Flyer yacht brand.



By 1927 the Florida land boom was bust, as was Huckins. When all seemed lost, Huckins married the love of his life, Betty Archibald, and set his mind to boats. With borrowed money he launched his boatbuilding business in 1928 and acted on his dream to design and build a seagoing planing boat. Huckins’ avant-garde approach to boatbuilding was clear from the start. Instead of a traditional multipiece keel with a separate stem timber, all were laminated as one. Copper rivets secured single-planked topsides and double diagonal bottoms. Hull No. 1 measured 42 feet and was completed in July 1928. She cruised at 20 knots with a pair of 125-horsepower gasoline engines.