First Build: Duffie Boatworks

By Nichole Osinski

If you follow the path that led Jon Duffie to becoming a boat builder it’s no surprise that his journey led him to where he is today.

Duffie’s family lived and breathed the fishing and boating scene. His grandfather was a Navy man who, after World War II, maintained a number of pleasure boats that he would fish on the Chesapeake Bay and Florida coast. His son, Jon’s dad, followed in his footsteps working on his father’s boats and fishing Florida and Maryland. Then a third generation was ready to, quite literally, take to the water.

“As soon as I was old enough to walk, I started fishing offshore,” Jon says.

A Duffie Family Tradition

Growing up, Jon remembers helping with the maintenance of the family boats. He learned the proper way to fix and repair anything onboard. He did bottom jobs and fixed leaks in the engine room, changed fuel lines and switched out bilge pumps.

“The better the boat is maintained, the safer it is,” Jon says. “There’s no way you’re walking home from where we were going.”

He even learned how to navigate on a paper charter from his father, who had learned it from his father.

“I knew from a young age that I always wanted to build a boat. I used to build model boats. I was cutting balsa frames and building little plank and frame boats in high school in my room,” he reminisces.

There was also a love for drawing that went hand in hand with this passion for all things boating.

“I have notebooks full of boat drawings of helm consoles, of hulls, of boats running at you, boats running away from you, fish jumping over boats, fish jumping behind boats; it was all I thought about. I remember going down to Oregon Inlet in the spring and drawing all of the charter boats,” Jon says. “I just love the creativity that goes into the design of these things, getting the lines right, getting the symmetry of it right.”

Duffie Gathers Experience

As he got older, he started working on other boats around the dock in Ocean City, Maryland. This led to fishing with different charter captains and getting a variety of experiences on the water.

“Each guy had his own method and everyone had their own ideas and ways to fish and you learn from that and all their techniques,” Jon recalls. “I got to pick up a lot of knowledge from them.”

Jon began to fish on different builders’ boats, including custom Carolina sportfishers, from Blackwells to Scarboroughs and more, in the early 90s.

One of Jon’s first forays into boat building was around the age of 18 when he helped build a 60-foot Scarborough with Ricky Sr. At the age of 23 he helped with the construction of a 66-footer that took about 29 months to complete.

“I was there the whole time driving Rick crazy with a million ideas,” Jon laughs. “When you’re in the boat shop everyday, you’re just soaking it all in.”

Around the age of 19, Jon met Tommy Hancock, who was in the middle of a Scarborough build. Jon was a good friend of Hancock’s captain, and the two would toss around ideas for the boat between fishing trips.

“Tommy said, ‘I know one day you’ll be building these boats and I’m going to come back to you and we’re going to talk,’” Jon remembers. “Here we are building them a 70-footer.”

The 26-foot Center Console

That first step into boat building started in 2016 with a 26-foot center console that Jon would work on in his garage. He’d spend time on the boat at night or when there was downtime from fishing later in the year. When it was time to fish in Costa Rica, he would lock the garage door and back in when it was spring to pick up where he had left off.

“Towards the end, I knew I’d switch from fishing year-round to building boats,” he says. “I just wanted to get it done.”

The boat was finished in 2019. He still has the 26-footer, noting that he would never sell it. And it was this first boat that would lead to hull number one for Duffie Boatworks’s sportfishers.

The 64-foot Billfisher

That same year Jon began work on what would be the 64-foot Billfisher.

While the idea was to start out simple, once Jon got into the design of the boat, he knew he didn’t want to build just any sportfisher out there.

“It just starts creeping up on you and you think, ‘You know I do need a faux teak toe rail, I do need a Palm Beach Towers hardtop on this,” Jon says. “I wanted people to get off the boat and go, ‘Wow I can’t believe this is the first [large] boat you built.’ I wanted them to be blown away.”

Jon knew that the boat needed to have the right symmetry, function correctly and be easy to maintain. And so the build began with the helm console, flybridge and bridge furniture starting in the garage.

Planning the Billfisher

“I was going to build the cabin in there, but by the time I’d designed the boat, the cabin wasn’t going to fit out of the garage door,” Jon says. “I thought, ‘Well, I could cut the front off the garage and build the cabin in here and pull it outside, but where is the hull going to be built?’”

By that time, Jon had an idea he was going to build Duffie’s current facility but wanted to see how the build of this sportfisher played out.

He built the topside first due to the amount of CFD testing they were doing on the hull.

“I kept tweaking the hull, and I’d do things like wanting to change the bottom just a little bit, so I thought, ‘We’ll start on the topside’ because I was really happy with the lines on that so we built the bridge, bridge furniture and then started the cabin,” Jon says. “But to build a cabin, I knew we’d need a bigger spot.”

The Dimensions

Jon turned to a 45 x 68 pole barn, where the cabin was built before getting pulled outside. The bow deck was built as a separate piece next. When it was complete, they pulled it outside. Finally, it was time for the hull.

“The boat is 64 feet 6 inches, the pole barn inside was 66 feet, so I had to cut the stem off so I could shut the garage door,” Jon recalls. “We just trimmed her off a little bit and shut the door the next day.”

The facility where Duffie Boatworks currently resides was still under construction, so when the building was complete, they rolled the 64’s hull over and brought it into the new shop. There was just one minor catch.

“We had a delay because we hauled the bow deck over here and got everything in here, then realized there was nothing to work with in here, so we had to outfit the shop,” Jon says.

But outfit it they did, and in 2021, the Billfisher was complete.

Duffie and the Billfisher Today

The Billfisher now sits behind the Duffie family house in Sunset Marina, Ocean City, Maryland. She’s been all over fishing tournaments from the White Marlin Open to the Pescadora Billfish Championship.

“It’s the family’s boat, it’s our test platform. No one’s going to be harder on it than me, and no one’s going to enjoy fishing on it more than my family,” Jon says.

Like the 26, the Billfisher is another testament to the work that goes into the builds at Duffie Boatworks. At the foundation of it all is Jon’s desire to make a modern boat that still retains what made those original sportfishers so iconic.

“I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I’m just trying to build a better wheel,” Jon says. “I’ve always been a fan of the older, more traditional-looking Carolina-style boats. I feel like we’re trying to blend a traditional profile with more modern construction techniques and modern shapes.”