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Published: February 24, 2008 10:14 pm

New life for Yankee Fleet; Retiring Hill to sell party boats to employees

The Yankee Fleet, which its owner says is New England's oldest and largest party boat business, is in the midst of a change in ownership - from founder to employees - and looking for a new home or homes.

After 60 years of being based in Gloucester, where he innovated whale watching and deep sea fishing, turning high-seas, hands-on entertainment into a dependable, three-season revenue stream for Cape Ann, Capt. Jerry Hill, 79, is selling his fleet and retiring.

"Enough is enough," said Hill, 79.

Hill said he and Carol, his wife and business partner, are completing the selloff of controlling interest in their business and five big whale-watch/party boats.

"An employee buyout is going on," said Hill from his winter home in Key West, Fla.

Hill said the expiration of his lease with Cape Ann Marina on Essex Avenue, where the fleet's been based on the Annisquam River since 1982, somewhat forced his hand.

"I've been trying to find someplace to relocate for the last five years with no success," he said.

Once the flotilla - Yankee Patriot, Yankee Spirit, Yankee Freedom, Yankee Clipper and Yankee Captain - is sold, the boats will be operated as independent businesses from new locations along the Inner Harbor by former employees and captains, a stable summer work force of 60 that Hill long has considered kin.

Carol Hill told the Times the goal is to keep the business together but that requires finding places to dock in Gloucester that are large enough for the fleet. The vessels range from 75 to 100 feet long.

"A lot of communities want us, but we want to stay," she said.

The Web site recently posted this notice: "After over 30 years at the Cape Ann Marina, the Yankee Fleet will be relocating to downtown Gloucester. We are really excited to be able to continue our goals of having the best fishing fleet on Cape Ann."

Negotiations are underway to berth one or more boats at the East Gloucester Marina, according to Steve Pardee, the project manager for the facility on East Main Street.

The economic impact of the Yankee Fleet on Cape Ann is incalculable, but its spring-to-fall, party boat, fishing, whale watching and charters have taken upward of 90,000 people a year to sea, producing revenues in excess of $4 million.

The quaint walk-up business, from the early days based on Rocky Neck, sold harbor trips for $1 (50 cents for children). It was deftly expanded for fishing, then whale watching, then adapted to the Internet Age with virtual reality experiences into ecotourism, educational tourism and links to the Smithsonian Institution and Scientific American.

Hill, the son of an MIT-educated engineer and himself a lifetime student of marine engineering, made sure the floating stock was kept ahead of the wave. The initial fleet of quaint wooden-hulled sport fishing boats - the Dolphin, Victory and Dorothy - gave way to the steel-hulled wonders of today, including the Yankee Freedom II, a $3 million catamaran that runs in the winter from Key West to the Dry Tortugas.

Hill provided his first charter trip in the summer of 1943. A group of adults lolling on the Little River "ahoyed" the 14-year-old on his little sailboat and offered him $2 to take them for a ride. Hill kept busy chartering all summer.

But he said as a youngster, he had been aware of Joe Frontiero's party boat dock on Commercial Street. The 1938 hurricane pushed the boats up the river where they were wrecked not far from the site of the Cape Ann Marina.

From his casual Little River sailboat charters, Hill quickly advanced to a fleet of sailboats and developed Bickford's Marina in Smith's Cove on Rocky Neck as the city's first recreational marina. Then he added outboards and developed a rental service for the guests of the big hotels in East Gloucester in the years before they burned.

The one failure came in the 1960s, when Hill became a partner in a line of high-end, double plank, mahogany yachts, built in Japan and outfitted at the Rocky Neck Marine Railway.

They were faster, sleeker and better than the competition. But they were undone by a manufacturing flaw - the No. 10 Japanese screws used in assembly were a tad smaller than the No. 10 American screws in the specifications - so the great boats tended to fall apart under stress.

Hill thereafter attended to the details of the making of his party and charter boats with a convert's zeal.

In the late '70s, the fleet moved north from Rocky Neck to the current site of East Gloucester Marine. The 100-foot Yankee Spirit was built to serve the nascent whale-watching business. In 1982, the business moved to its present location on the Annisquam River, where skeptics assumed it would founder literally and figuratively.

"The general consensus on the baloney circuit was there's no way we could (maneuver in the river)," said Hill in a 2003 Times profile. "Since then, we've doubled the size of the boats."

But he said the Yankee Fleet needed more space and "autonomy." The Conservation Commission thwarted his hope to develop Hill-owned property adjacent to Cape Ann Marina into a permanent home for the fleet.

Hill credits another harbor tour operator, Fred Douglass, with making the first whale-watch trips, but said he believed a Yankee Fleet charter commissioned in the '80s by naturalist Sarah Robbins was the first whale-watch charter.

He also said he believed the Yankee Fleet is "the longest continuous running party boat operation" in America.

"We've had plenty of kids come on a trip, then come to work for us, then go on to work in the maritime field, or study it in college," Alan Colby, a former longtime employee, told the Times for the 2003 profile of Hill. "It's not unusual for me to run into people at hunting and fishing shows who say their grandparents first took them fishing on the Yankee Fleet."