There’s a stretch of US-1 through Edgewater where the buildings run long and low behind a chain-link fence, a couple hundred cars parked out front, no signage to speak of. You could drive past twice a day for a year and never once wonder about it.
This is Boston Whaler’s manufacturing location, where their boats are made in Edgewater, Florida.
It is a 550,000-square-foot site, and about 1,200 people work there. The street address is 100 Whaler Way.
Every boat, as of June
That word “every” turned literal this summer.
Brunswick owns Whaler, and for the past year it had been pulling production out of the Flagler Beach plant and folding the work into Edgewater. The move finished in June. Roughly 300 people had jobs in the Flagler building and every one of them was offered a spot down here, with a transfer offer and a mild commute. Edgewater gained a large manufacturing partner.
The foam is the whole thing
Most fiberglass boats are a hull with flotation stuffed in wherever it fits.
Whaler runs it the other way around. The hull and the inner liner get laid up in separate molds, and those molds are heavier than anything you’d find at another builder because of what comes next. The two halves are brought together while they’re still sitting in the tooling. Closed-cell foam gets shot into the cavity between them under pressure, expands until it has filled every last void, and chemically bonds to the fiberglass on both sides as it cures. What rolls out is one piece. Glass, foam, glass, fused into a single structure, and the foam ends up carrying much of the load itself.
This is where their claim, that a boat could be sawed in half and still float, comes from. Dick Fisher did it for LIFE magazine back in the fifties, cut a Whaler in two and drove off in the half that had the motor on it. The company still puts on the demonstration. It’s a good trick. The trick is the foam doing what the foam always does.
No do-overs
The seconds while that foam expands are the most important seconds in the build.
Nothing gets fixed afterward. Blow the fill and you have a boat-shaped problem you can’t open back up, so the people running that station tend to be people who have been running it a long while. Some of the hands on that floor have forty years of experience.
The line runs from thirteen-foot boats up to forty-two-footers, all of them on the same site. Tooling for a thirteen is something two people can walk around, while the molds at the top of the range come closer to the size of a building. Running that whole spread through one plant is its own problem, separate from the foam, and it took years to sort out.
Massachusetts, 1958
Whaler didn’t start in Florida. Fisher founded it in Massachusetts in 1958, which is where the name came from, working the early foam-filled hull out with a naval architect named C. Raymond Hunt. The company built boats up there for about thirty years before the whole operation moved south around 1989.
Manufacturers relocate all the time. Staying put for the thirty-five years afterward is the harder thing.
Sixty acres and two years of meetings
Since 2014 Whaler has put better than $60 million into the Edgewater site and pushed capacity up by something like seventy-five percent.
In 2017 it closed on roughly sixty more acres along the northern edge of the property. That deal ran over two years, most of it spent across a table from the city and from residents of the neighborhood butting up against the land. Two years of meetings to buy dirt. Tedious is the right word for it, and the company sat through it anyway.
Then in 2019 Brunswick opened a 45,000-square-foot fiberglass boat technology center on the same campus and moved the product development and engineering people into it. Design and production now share a parking lot. A question that used to cost a week of email costs a walk.
The county put money in
When Whaler committed to the 2014 expansion, the Volusia County Council backed the company’s participation in Florida’s Qualified Target Industry Tax Refund program, which pays out against higher-wage job creation. Incentive packages get oversold in this line of work. Most of them do less than the announcement implies and everybody in economic development knows it. This one, by Whaler’s own telling, factored into the decision.
One plant, a town of 23,000
Edgewater has maybe 23,000 residents. An employer with 1,200 people on site changes a place that size in ways it never would in Orlando. You see it in school enrollment numbers, and you see it at the lunch counters when a shift lets out.
The suppliers feel it harder than anyone. A plant that big buys machining, fabrication, composites, coatings, and freight, and a lot of that gets purchased within an hour’s drive. Shops around here like Advanced Machining, Custom Tube, and Riversedge Composites built themselves partly on marine work, then carried that capability into aerospace and defense.
The specs are not loose, either. Whaler runs 316-L stainless on its railings and hardware and triple chrome plates its fasteners, because saltwater finds everything eventually. A supplier who can hold that standard can hold it for a defense contract too, which is how a fair number of these shops ended up where they are.
Not everything leaving the building is recreational, either. Government agencies and military outfits run Whaler hulls for patrol and rescue, which comes with its own specs and a procurement calendar that pays no attention to the retail season.
Fiberglass hands
Try hiring a laminator in most of the country and see how far you get. Finishers, riggers, gelcoat people, same story.
Southeast Volusia has a concentration of all of it, because Whaler and the other builders in the area have spent decades training those hands. If your product touches composites, you’d be recruiting off a bench that doesn’t exist at this depth in many places. That advantage took forty years to build and it isn’t something another region can stand up in a hurry.
Go look at it
Whaler runs factory tours at the Edgewater plant, and you don’t have to be shopping for a boat to take one. Watching a liner and a hull come together and get shot full of foam will do more for your sense of what advanced manufacturing looks like around here than reading about it ever will.
The Southeast Volusia Manufacturing and Technology Coalition has worked with Whaler and the rest of the manufacturers across New Smyrna Beach, Edgewater, and Oak Hill since 2016, when the three cities agreed to operate as a single economic region. If you’re sizing up the area for your own operation, or you need to know which local shop does what, that’s who to call. Reach the coalition at 386-566-4966 or through sevolusia.com.