As Fred Wahl Marine Construction turns 50, the man behind the Oregon empire reflects
The man’s name is on the company sign—Fred Wahl Marine Construction. And the Reedsport, Ore.-based commercial shipyard and boatbuilder, which began with Wahl and his toolbox, celebrates 50 years in business this year.
When in his presence on the banks of the Umpqua River, Teddy Roosevelt’s “walk quietly but carry a big stick” stance comes to mind.
“Since I’m almost 78, I don’t get here real early anymore,” the soft-spoken Wahl said. “I get here about 9:30 or 10 (a.m.) and I make my rounds. Visit my lead people and see what kind of disasters we’re running into.
“Pretty much got a good bunch of people here,” he chuckled. “They can run this thing without me, but they don’t seem to understand that yet.”
A notable vessel in the yard during a visit by Fishermen’s News to the facility in late June was the f/v Progress, which is undergoing a 2,000-horsepower re-power. The boat is a return customer that, after being struck by a wave of up to 40-feet in 2018, came to Fred Wahl Marine for a sponson, mid-body lengthening and pilothouse expansion.
At a glance, tow and fishing boats dominate the yard. The increased towboat business is newer for the company, but welcome.
“Fishing industry in Alaska is not getting very good,” Wahl said. “Prices are gone. Fish canneries are coming and going quickly and closing plants. People fishing for 20-year, 30-year, 40-year-old prices.”
He has seen many industry ups and downs over the decades. At the time of this writing, his company employs about 75 people and is hiring.
“It’s a bit harder to find and keep good craftspeople than the old days,” he said.
“People just worked (back in the day),” Wahl said. “There’s lots of ‘em around, but the ones of quality have jobs. A couple of years ago we had 110 people working here (and were) looking for 20 more. Right now, we’re down to about 75 and can’t find any more.”
Regardless of what’s to come, his central ethos has served him well through good times and bad.
“I think everyone wants roses,” Wahl said. “The world’s not full of roses. Just got to get up and go to work, that’s all. Keep doing it, something is going to happen right in your life. We’ve been fortunate a few times, ran into some big stumbling blocks other times.”
“I’ve enjoyed every bit of it,” Wahl said. “And I’m not done yet.”
The Early Years
Wahl was born and raised in Depoe Bay, Ore., a town of about 100 residents. He recalled the two-room schoolhouse where he attended sixth grade with about 25 classmates.
“The Painter and Robinson boys were fishermen,” Wahl recalled. “The Wahls, Painters and Robinsons were over half the kids in school.”
He grew wistful.
“Friend of mine (that I grew up with) is a fisherman in Alaska…he said we were all happy, all of us in Depoe Bay,” Wahl said. “We were all happy. We were poor (but) didn’t know it.”
Wahl’s father was a local mechanic.
“You didn’t throw stuff away,” Wahl said. “Your engine started knocking in your car, you took it to your local mechanic and he’d put new bearings and stuff in. That’s what my dad did, he took care of a lot of trollers. Coast run trollers that would come down to Newport, down this way, pick up fish and follow them back up to the Columbia River. Kind of a romantic fishery.”
He joined the family business when he was 12 and was welding Dungeness crab pot frames when he was 14. Typically, the largest boats were around 40 feet in the small harbor.
Wahl was part of a trio that built a couple of steel hulls and tried his hand fishing like his friends. In an twist of fate, he found out the hard way that he was chronically seasick.
“I went fishing but could never get over being seasick and ended up with ulcers after a year,” Wahl said. “So, I just quit. A lot of young people who I went to school with ended up going to Alaska. Fishing with their dads or whatever or just crew members. It wasn’t for me because I was going to get seasick and I knew it, so I stayed home. Went to Kodiak for a few years after I worked Yaquina Boat Works (in Newport, Ore.). I decided to start my own company… in 1974.”
Thus, in-part thanks to the combination of chronic seasickness and limitless passion for all things boats, Fred Wahl Marine Construction was born.
“If I was going to have a company name, I was going to tell them who I was and what I did, so that’s why it was Fred Wahl Marine Construction,” Wahl explained. “(Business) started off real slow. In 1980, I think I bought an old gear shed the Painters had in town.”
He went to work with whomever had the gumption and ability to join. Dockside repairs in Newport, stern ramps, gantries, winches and “whatever we could” do were the kind of jobs that got the company started.
Wahl recalled building over 2,200 finished king crab pots in a year.
“It was good times,” Wahl said. “I ended up building four boats in Depoe Bay and we were up on the highway. I had to take them down the road behind the dump truck on a trailer. I built and launched them at the public boat launch and that’s pretty big for a 58-footer.”
That public boat launch splash was a signal of what was to come. Wahl got another opportunity to build a boat for a southeast Alaskan client, but this 58-footer was wider, deeper and just too big for Wahl’s trailer.
A battered Reedsport, Ore., shipyard on the Umpqua River beckoned.
“The shipyard was defunct across the river (from Bolon Island),” Wahl explained. “It had been in several bankruptcies and owned by the port and so I bought the lease.”
After a hop across the sometimes-wild Umpqua River Bar, the idyllic, twisting river can have an otherworldly effect upon approaching mariners fresh off the open Pacific Ocean.
Massive sand dunes—the very ones that inspired sci-fi author Frank Herbert—rise to the north as seal haul outs and blissed-out herds of cattle populate the beaches to the south. Salmon leap in abundance during the season, attracting ospreys and bald eagles.
Little Reedsport on the south bank, the arching Umpqua River Bridge to the east, and Bolon Island to the north mark the spot for mariners seeking Wahl’s services. Forests cover the hilly countryside of this quiet maritime sanctuary.
Fred Wahl Marine moved into the yard in 1991.
“There was another guy who had it, but he had no expertise and no clientele and no tools,” Wahl said. “He (only) had big dreams. So we went in there and started cleaning the place up.”
The first haul outs were messy with the rusty infrastructure. The third boat was sponsoned for a friend in Newport and derailed, ruining the ways.
“We were working on a prayer,” Wahl said. “At that point, I tore it all out.”
A major rebuild worked out adequately enough for years.
“We could end haul them into a big building and we could side haul ‘em, but it was not easy,” he said.
As it was years prior during the public launch days, it was time to grow.
Bolon Island Empire
In 2015, Fred Wahl Marine bought the current 38-acre property that it sits on across the Umpqua River on Bolon Island. The company built the entire facility: offices, fabrication building, machine shop, dock and more.
“We did every bit of it ourselves except drive the pilings,” Wahl said with pride. At one point, both properties were building 58-footers at the same time. The gamechanger came when the company bought a 600-ton travelift for the Bolon Island location. The new lift enabled him to help an old Painter clan friend from the Depoe Bay days, Ted Painter Jr.
“He had the Alaskan Trojan,” Wahl said of the fishing vessel. He had worked on the 127-foot Bender boat through the years dockside, but with the Bolon Island yard he could finally haul the f/v Alaskan Trojan. They even sponsoned out the boat 42 feet.
“Did all the drafting work. Designed a nice big, flared bow on it. It was a beautiful job,” Wahl reminisced.
A crossroads came when the newly enlarged Alaskan Trojan returned loaded with fuel. The fully loaded vessel weighed over 700 tons—too big for the lift.
“I couldn’t have him (as) a customer because the 600-ton ways were taken up by sponsoning that boat,” Wahl explained. “To keep him as a customer, I was forced to go buy a bigger lift, which is okay.”
The industry demand was there for an 825-ton Travelift, so Fred Wahl Marine Construction got one. The two lifts cement the yard as a leader on the West Coast.
“I’m pretty happy with (the) 825 ton. I don’t know if we’re going to try to go any bigger,” Wahl said. “We’re kind of stuck for about the size we are, 800-some tons, 42 feet wide, go about 175, 180 feet long. The manpower in this neck of the woods is not very good and I’m not moving.”
While his bread and butter is ship maintenance and repair, Wahl’s eyes light up when talking about boatbuilding.
“It’s a fun job,” he said. “It’s interesting job. We’ve built 50 new boats and those are always a pleasure … most of them are 58 footers. We had boats of our own, we had the f/v Victory. It’s probably the newest king crab boat in the fleet, which doesn’t mean much.”
The Wahl-designed, steel hulled f/v Victory was delivered in 2013.
The company has made a name for itself for their family of widebody steel fishing boats in the 58 foot range.
“F/V Arctic Fox was the first wide body 58 (feet long), 26 feet wide,” Wahl said of the vessel, which was delivered in 2006. “We built that for ourselves because I wanted to build a widebody boat. We built it and sent it fishing. They are really good boats.”
The newest Fred Wahl Marine Construction build is the f/v Uyak, a 68-footer delivered in 2022. For Wahl, the name means more than simply a reference to the remote Alaskan island.
“That ledger right there says Uyak on it,” Wahl points to a small wooden case in his office. His friend Painter Jr. gave him the book about his parents’ time as owners of a Ted Geary-built schooner of the same name. The handwriting is from his own mother and father.
“My old man and Ted Painter Sr., they bought the boat and this is all the expenditures…it’s all my mom’s handwriting,” Wahl said. His folks have long passed but the book is a link to them.
‘Like a Little Kid Being Born’
For Wahl, boatbuilding is a magical practice.
“You take a bunch of parts and pieces and steel and form it into a shape. Make a boat out of it,” Wahl said. “And you put engines and stuff in it. Paint it. Wire it. When we build a boat here, we do everything ourselves. We build our own cranes and anchor winches. We build our own anchors.”
The labor leads to a single moment at splash.
“When you put it in the water and the first time it floats,” Wahl said. “We say it pops. It’s usually on the ways, the boat is stuck a bit. Then it just jumps up about half an inch maybe. And all of a sudden, there they are! To me, it’s like a little kid being born or something. All of a sudden, it’s on its own.”
He describes the newborn’s first moments.
“It can float. It can drive. It can do all the stuff you’ve intended to do that first time it floats,” he said. “It’s kind of fun. I enjoy…building new boats. We just don’t get to do it very often.”
In many ways, Wahl has come a long way from his early days as a seasick Oregon youth with a toolbox and disposition toward boats. Over 50 years, he has built a maritime empire on a slice of riverine paradise that is a key pillar of the entire region’s industry.
However, when spending time with him, one realizes that perhaps one of his most remarkable qualities is that he has not deviated from that prime ethos at all. At his core, Wahl is a hardworking small-town guy who gives a damn. For that, the industry has been grateful for 50 years now.
Norris Comer is a Seattle-based writer and author. His debut memoir, Salmon in the Seine: Alaskan Memories of Life, Death, & Everything In-Between is now available wherever books are sold. You can find him on Substack, Instagram and at norriscomer.com. He can be reached via email at norriscomer@substack.com.