Boat building in Ballard is on an upswing thanks to a $600 million contract awarded in part to Kvichak Marine, for constructing the Coast Guard's next generation of patrol boats.

Kvichak will partner with Wisconsin-based Marinette Marine Corp. to build more than 200 aluminum pursuit vessels over the next ten years. The company, located on the Lake Washington Ship Canal near Leary Way, will need to hire as many as 100 employees to meet the demand.

"We've had good success in attracting people, but when you're talking about doubling the size of your workforce over a three our four year period ...it makes it a little bit difficult to sleep at night," said Brian Thomas, vice president and co owner of Kvichak Marine.

Thomas says the boats, which will be about 45 feet long and 15 feet at their widest, will require a lot of materials expertise. Electricians, mechanics, engineers and managers would all be required, but for building aluminum boats, fabricators and welders would be two of the positions most in demand.

"Oh you'll see a lot of blue flame out there," Thomas said.

Thomas expects that the design phase for building the Coast Guard's Response Boat - Medium (RB-M), will last through most of 2007, when construction begins. The company will produce a small number of the boats for the Coast Guard to put through paces before Kvichak ramps up to some 15 boats a year, requiring 75 to 85 full time craftsmen, along with some administrative overhead.

Thomas described the RB-M as a "multi-mission craft," built for a number of differing duties including interdiction and search and rescue, and including a self-righting hull for operating in heavy weather. The design calls for the boat to be powered by twin diesel engines and water jets capable of propelling the vessels to speeds of 42 knots, or nearly 50 miles an hour, which would make them among the fast ships found in saltwater bays and harbors.

The contract with the Coast Guard business represents the biggest contract of Kvichak's 25 year history. The company was founded in 1981 by Jim Meckley and Keith Whitemore, who, with Thomas, grew up together racing sailboats in high school. For much of its history, Kvichak built fishing boats for the fishing industry and its name comes from an Alaskan River, north of the Aleutian islands.

"That market got very small by 1996 and 1997," Thomas said, but by then, Kvichak had diversified into designing vessels for customers with other rigorous demands. Kvichak designs pilot boats that ferry local captains to navigate foreign cargo ships to port under nearly all weather conditions. The company has even built a hovercraft for use in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, where the water is frozen nine months of the year.

Thomas said the RB-M business will require a new facility for Kvichak. He said Ballard, with its maritime infrastructure, was an optimal place to open a second facility, but there were big considerations to ponder before that decision is made. In part, Thomas said, Ballard's booming destination-status for home buyers has made the market tight for new industrial building. He said the other big question is the viaduct, and how people will get to and from Ballard without it.

"What happens if [workers] have to take Alaskan Way down here to work for four or five years? Those are issues we have to be thinking about," Thomas said.

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