A Brunswick employee works on one of the pontoons at the Fort Wayne boatmaking company. Provided image
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“It’s a great time to be a boatbuilder.”
Who would have thought we would have heard those words uttered during a pandemic?
But Erik Bon Fleur, director of operations for Brunswick Corp., a Fort Wayne boat manufacturing company, said just that during an interview March 1.
The company, which makes pontoon boats under the Harris and Cypress Cay names, already has hired 20 new people and is looking to fill 30-40 more positions at its Allen County plant on Hadley Road.
The jobs pay between $14-$21 an hour. Open positions range from assembly, welders and quality technicians to team leaders, engineers and supply chain. Most don’t require experience, except for welding jobs.
Bon Fleur said they’re looking for people with a “good attitude, good work ethic. It’s a pretty competitive job market.”
If it seems incongruous that the boat market is thriving in the midst of a pandemic and economic downturn, Bon Fleur has a theory about that. Many people didn’t travel last year due to COVID-19 concerns. But they still wanted to have summer fun with friends and family in a safe environment. A boat allowed for small, safe gatherings where people could get outside in the fresh air and create some good memories.
It’s similar to what is happening in the RV industry. A few weeks ago, Adams County Executive Director of Economic Development Colton Bickel said Adams County’s biggest employer, REV Group, which makes recreational vehicles, was having trouble finding enough people to work in general production.
Bickel said the RV business is thriving and may have benefitted from the pandemic because in an RV people could travel without flying and enjoy nature and the great outdoors without taking risks that would unnecessarily expose them to COVID-19.
Bon Fleur said the plant did shut down for a few weeks last year due to the pandemic, but when they came out of the shutdown they found good demand for their pontoon boats.
The pandemic seems to have been hardest on those in lower-paying jobs such as restaurants and retail who aren’t likely to have the financial means to buy a luxury item, such as an RV or a boat.
The pontoons Brunswick makes range in price from about $25,000 for a 19-foot boat to over $100,000 for a premium model.
These aren’t your grandparents’ pontoons that you putzed around the lake in going a whopping 10 mph if you were lucky.
Nor are today’s new pontoons powered by a 40 HP Mercury. Bon Fleur said they’re seeing more pontoons sporting a 200 or 300 HP motor. “You can ski, tube, tow or wakeboard” with these larger engines, he said.
They may not look as sexy as a bona fide ski boat, but the other advantage to pontoons is that you can fit – pardon the pun – a boatload of people on them. They’re the very definition of a party barge.
Bon Fleur said people enjoy the versatility of today’s pontoons. Some are made for cruising, some are made for watersports and some are decked out for fishing. The Harris Crown is a behemoth with three pontoons and a maximum 400 HP motor It can carry 11-13 people and is 28 feet long. The base price, according to the Harris website, is $88,254.
The Brunswick plant in Fort Wayne can crank out a pontoon boat from start to finish in 2½ days, Bon Fleur said, but some take over a week.
“We do everything,” he said of the manufacturing process. They start with raw sheets of aluminum and roll them into pontoons. Using an assembly line process the boat then goes down the line getting a deck, railing, furniture (sourced locally) and a Mercury motor.
For competitive reasons, Bon Fleur won’t say how many boats they make a year, but did say, “We’re expecting double digit growth this year.”
The Fort Wayne factory has about 350 employees working a single shift – Monday-Thursday, 10-hour days. Friday is reserved for overtime so employees don’t have to work weekends. He said training for most jobs only takes 1-2 weeks. Hours are 5:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m.
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