Page 74 - 52nd Annual White Marlin Open

You just celebrated your 60thAnniversary in 2024. That
must have been a source of pride for you and the rest
of the crew atViking. What is theViking origin story? employees and boat fixtures from Egg Harbor to the storage
facility on the marina property.
100% a source of pride for all of us. In 1960, my father Bill
Healey and uncle Bob Healey bought the piece of property that They sold the marina shortly after buying Peterson Viking and
we are still on today. It was a vacant tract of land that was used kept the back building where they started Viking. We are still
to build a Garden State Parkway Bridge over the Bass River. on that same campus but have grown from that one back build-
My father built a marina on the site and an office/showroom to ing to nearly one million sq ft. of space.
sell boats. They sold Owens, Luhrs and Boston Whalers which
were all three good brands back in the early ‘60s. The long- What was that firstViking boat building process like?
range plan was to build apartments around the marina but sep-
tic issues scrapped that idea so they built a large winter storage You would have a master carpenter make the stem on the boat
warehouse on the back of the property. They did well renting just like the guys in North Carolina do today. The stem would
out slips and selling and storing boats. fit into these fixtures and then you would oak plank the en-
tire fixture and then once the whole boat was planked, they
How did the business transition from a marina and would go and release the fixtures from the planks. Then they
showroom to boat building? flip it over and they put bulkheads and stringers in it and then
it would go down a production line for the finishes. That first
Carl Peterson had a small boat building business called Peterson boat was a 37-footer. By 1966, we were up to making one boat
Viking in Egg Harbor.He was building about one boat a year and a month.
over all I think built about four boats total. In 1964, there was
a bump in the economy and Peterson couldn’t make all of his AllVikings now are of course made of fiberglass. Tell us
financial commitments. My Dad and Uncle bought the compa- about that transition.
ny on April 1, 1964 and assumed the debt. They dropped the

Peterson name, called itVikingYacht Company and moved the We began transitioning to fiberglass starting in 1969. We did
the bottom of the boats in wood and the top of the boats and

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60 | visit us online at www.WhiteMarlinOpen.com

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