Probably the first thing you need to do when contemplating the purchase of a new yacht is to check your passbook to make sure there is at least $3.5 million in the account.
Sure, $6 million would be better, but $3.5 million might get the job done.
At that point you can contact David Ross, which could be harder than assembling the money.
Simply showing up with a paper bag full of cash at Ross’ Burger Boat Co. yard here in this industrial town on Lake Michigan’s shore, 180 miles north of Chicago, probably won’t cut it. Ross does take cold calls in his second-floor office in the clapboard Burger headquarters building, but he is more comfortable meeting potential customers in a suitable milieu: Newport, R.I., for example, or the yacht basin at Nassau, the Bahamas, for an informal chat over a Cuban Cohiba and a snifter of cognac.
Don’t arrive in a dory. At some point, you probably will notice him glancing at the yacht you arrived in.
“If people who aren’t into yachting comes to us, we’d direct them to someone else,” he said. “Once they become an experienced yachters and familiar enough to custom order, we’ll talk to them.”
There’s a practical reason for that, which he’ll explain later.
Don’t be taken aback by Ross’ laid-back appearance, the casual clothes and long-but-thinning hair that belie his experience long ago as a booker of nightclub acts in Chicago. He owns his own yacht, albeit a mere 72-footer. Burger will build one for you up to 150 feet long.
He’s also a stickler for detail and quality. If you want a marble floor in the galley, he’ll install it.
“The sky is the limit. You pay, we do. We can install gold-plated fixtures and hand-chiseled powder room lavs.
“We cater to people’s obsession with high quality. When someone wants this or that change, we’ll tell them it will cost $15,000 and we don’t expect them to have a stroke,” Ross said.
A more likely candidate for a stroke is Burger’s marine architect, Don O’Keefe, of Dublin, who has to custom design a floating palace that can also safely navigate oceans.
“Some clients have a far-fetched idea of what can be done,” O’Keefe said.
In a few instances, Burger has broken off negotiations with prospective customers who have unreasonable expectations, which is one of the major reasons he prefers dealing with experienced yachtsmen. They know you can’t install a 10-ton marble replica of the Pieta on the top deck as an afterthought, without affecting stability and performance.
A tip to potential yacht buyers that will save you a lot of grief with Burger’s marine architects: a speed of 20 to 25 knots is ideal. Anything faster and you run the risk of breaking the Ming vase or fine china in a sharp turn or a heavy wave.
To attain the speeds motor yacht owners demand, the hulls are designed relatively narrow in relation to length. Cruise ships that plod along at a leisurely 10 knots can have relatively wider hulls to increase stability. It’s a complicated formula.
“If you’re designing a commercial boat (like a freighter), all you need is durability and the power to drive it. Here, aesthetics are a major factor,” said O’Keefe.
The speed of your yacht is negotiable, but impatience over the time it takes Burger Boat to build it is a solecism. You had better understand upfront that the company builds only three custom yachts a year, and it takes about two years from the beginning of negotiations to delivery. And Burger Boat won’t take an old yacht in trade–not even one it built.
So while O’Keefe is designing Hull No. 486 for delivery in April 1999, Mel Kasper in the cabinetry shop is working on an armoire for the master stateroom of Hull No. 482 for delivery next April and Romy Gaedtke is welding together the aluminum pieces to Hull No. 484 for delivery next fall.
The boats will be named after their owners accept them for delivery. Around Burger Boat, they are numbered to conform to usual shipbuilding practice and to protect the owner’s anonymity.
All 155 employees at the yard know who the owners are because they frequently show up–as often as once a week–to watch the phases of construction. It is expensive entertainment, but the people at Burger Boat believe if you are going to plunk down $6 million or more for a custom yacht, you ought to be able to watch them build it.
That includes a visit to the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., to watch a six-foot model of your hull undergo testing in a water tank that is the marine equivalent of a wind tunnel.
The fun starts with meetings with Ross and his staff on the fundamentals. This could take a year.
“We start by taking oral briefs from owners,” said Ross. This includes the speed, range, how much the customer intends to spend, interior motif and intended use. A yacht intended exclusively for coastal sailing has to be designed differently than one the owner plans to use to cross the oceans. A coastal yacht, for example, will probably have its propellers recessed in tunnels to help it negotiate shallow harbors. An ocean-going yacht, like Hull No. 482, will need a 10,000-gallon fuel tank extending the length of the vessel to give it a range of 4,000 nautical miles.
This is another reason Burger Boat doesn’t like to deal with rank amateurs, albeit rich ones. It is much easier to design a yacht if the owner knows a lot about how it works.
On the other hand, it matters little to the performance of the yacht whether the control panel is faced with Carpathian elm or teak veneer. But those are among the thousands of decisions that must be made.
“The nature of the business has changed dramatically in my time,” said O’Keefe, who has been designing yachts since 1965, the last 11 years for Burger. “It was male-dominated when I started. Men used to tell us to make the interior of mahogany and left the details to us. Nowadays women play a dominant role in the decision-making process.
“In the old days there was one bathroom (head). Now there are his and hers and bidets,” O’Keefe said.
Once the oral briefings are completed, the Burger Boat staff will type up an 80-page book of specifications, quote a “ballpark price,” and, if all goes well, offer you a contract to build it.
This is where the $6 million becomes important because Burger Boat expects regular progress payments. By the time the superstructure is welded to the hull, the company wants up to 40 percent of its money.
When negotiating with Burger Boat, don’t be pretentious, no matter how much money you have. They aren’t.
Kasper greets visitors to his shop with a “born and raised in Chicago, you betcha.”
It is a proud old company, founded in 1863 by Henry B. Burger to build fishing boats when Manitowoc was becoming a major ship-building center on the Great Lakes. Only Burger is left of the scores of boat yards that once lined the Manitowoc River and built everything from schooners for the lumber trade to submarines for the Navy in World War II.
Manitowoc Shipbuilding moved to Sturgeon Bay, Wis., in 1970 because it needed room to build the 1,000-foot ore boats then coming into vogue. Burger was forced to close in 1990, when the several changes in ownership and imposition of the federal luxury tax dried up orders.
“We could see it coming. When the trucks came in and the delivery was COD, we could see what was happening,” said Gaedtke.
He was one of 165 employees, most veteran craftsmen, who lost their jobs when the yard was closed. He went to work making farm machinery. Kasper went to work for a Green Bay cabinet shop, and O’Keefe became a “consultant.”
Meanwhile, Ross, a high school dropout and ex-Marine was selling his Ross-Ehlert Photo Labs in Chicago, going through a divorce and looking for a new career. He had started the labs with photographer Ray Ehlert after proliferating discos drove him out of the band-booking business.
“I gravitate to the business end of my passions. I did it with music, photography and now boating,” he said.
While sitting on his 50-foot Italian express cruiser in Palm Beach one day, admiring a Burger yacht, he had an idea.
“I told my broker to see if we couldn’t buy the company. He told me it was too late. They had shut down,” Ross said.
So Ross called Manitowoc and got invited up by Mayor Kevin Crawford, who was anxious to get the yard reopened.
“It took me a year. Anybody could buy the name, but I had to reassemble the craftsmen,” Ross said. Eventually 145 agreed to return.
“We were very much reliant on the craftsmen here. We knew nothing about building boats but they didn’t know much about selling them.”
The problem then was rebuilding the company’s reputation. He got two quick orders, but couldn’t convince the yacht-buying public that Burger Boat was back until he exhibited the company’s new vessel, Hull No. 474, by then named the Windrush, at the Ft. Lauderdale International Boat Show in October 1994.
Now Burger Boat is trying to crack the international market dominated by German and Dutch yacht builders.
“To be a player in the world market, we had to make sure we were as good as the competition,” he said.
So if you want to make points during your initial briefing with the Burger Boat people, mention that their yachts look as good as anything built in Europe. Then, get out your checkbook.
