How To Build A Good Life In Boats

Only time will tell whether Gen Z is the epitome of the “skills gap,” or whether it is, as the Wall Street Journal told us last spring, “the Toolbelt Generation.” One thing’s for sure: There’s some kind of change on the wind. “A lot of people look at today’s students and say, ‘They don’t want to work. They just want to play video games.’ But that’s not true,” says Gregg Snyder, manager of Yamaha Marine University.

“Go out into the schools and look. You’ll see people who are really, really interested in working with their hands.”

Snyder chairs the Marine Service Technology judging panel at the annual SkillsUSA competition – a national event drawing some 7,000 high school and post-secondary students to Atlanta, Georgia, where they compete for scholarships and other prizes. The more than 130 hands-on disciplines range from computer animation to culinary arts to construction trades. Among that number last June were several dozen aspiring marine technicians. “This is only the top people from the state and regional competitions, so that number grows exponentially. Every one of them was there to show off what they can do already,” Snyder says. “They arrived proud.”

Boaters have known all along what neuroscience is telling us now: Hands-on engagement with the physical world brings benefits, not just for our bodies but for our minds. Meanwhile, fresh ideas in economics and education are challenging our 100-year-old notions that separated work with our hands from work with our minds. Whether you’re looking for a mid-career change or are counseling a young person on their next steps into education and their working lives after high school, all these threads open a world of pathways that can lead – surprisingly directly – to an enriching life on the water.

Thinking With Your Hands

Zachary Volpicelli was the top IT guy, the networks and systems administrator, at Brandeis University in the late 1990s. Though he hadn’t grown up around boats, the job placed him near the Boston Sailing Center, where he and his wife learned to sail dinghies, then J/24s, experiences that progressed into overnight and weekend sailing excursions. In 2002 Volpicelli saw a clever ad in Professional Boatbuilder magazine – “The cure for the common career” – that introduced the Marine Systems program at the Landing School in Arundel, Maine.

“I read that and thought, ‘I have a common career,’” Volpicelli says. “I loved boats more than I loved working at a university fixing people’s servers.” He joined the Landing School class of 2004. Between applying for and starting the program, the couple crewed for several months aboard a sailboat from California to the South Pacific, then he crewed on the Nantucket Hy-Line Ferry. After he graduated from the yearlong Marine Systems program, the couple moved to Bellingham, Washington, where Volpicelli cold-called Seaview Boatyard, the biggest service yard around, and asked for a job. “They started me at $14 an hour,” he says. “Within a year and a half, I was lead mechanic.” Within another year and a half he was operations manager for the business’s four properties. For several years Volpicelli managed those yards, then moved back East and managed a Cape Cod boatyard for 11 years before returning to the Landing School to lead the program that started his career in boats.

It’s a path Yamaha’s Gregg Snyder understands. “The entry point is only the entry point,” Snyder says, reflecting on his beginnings at Universal Technical Institute in Houston, where he trained in automotive and heavy diesel technology. “Where it goes from there is up to you. The sky’s the limit.”

Both men’s experiences speak to something Matthew Crawford wrote about in a 2009 bestseller called “Shop Class as Soulcraft.” After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and a career as executive director of a Washington think tank, Crawford pivoted midstream to open a small shop where he repairs Japanese motorcycles. “This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence – the rich cognitive challenges and psychic nourishment – I’ve always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as ‘knowledge work,’” he wrote. “Surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. There’s more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.”

New brain research backs up Crawford’s observation. “When we move and when we engage in physical activities, we change the neurochemistry in our brain in ways that a drug can change it,” said Dr. Kelly Lambert, a University of Richmond neuroscientist, on a CBS Sunday Morning segment called “Handiwork: How Busy Hands May Help the Brain.” “I’ve made up a term ‘behavior-ceuticals’ instead of pharmaceuticals. If you’re making something, painting, or cooking, and you’re using both hands and putting things together in a creative way, that’s more engaging for the brain than sitting at a desk and pressing buttons on a keyboard. It increases certain neurochemicals. And if you produce something, there’s the reward.”

Educating The Toolbelt Generation

Crawford’s book traces the economic and educational trends that separated training minds from training hands back to the federal Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. “Wherever the separation of thinking from doing has been achieved, it has been responsible for the degradation of work.” From Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 comic masterpiece “Modern Times” to Kevin Smith’s 1994 cult classic “Clerks” or reruns of “The Office,” we all know the degradation Crawford describes on both sides of the tired blue-collar/white-collar divide, tied as it was that 20th-century bugaboo, the monolithic IQ test.

More recent theories of multiple intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic) have done wonders for matching educations to individual learning styles. The separated and stigmatized vo-tech schools of the past have given way to today’s more integrated Career and Technical Education programs that encourage students to learn a marketable skill and prepare themselves academically for intellectual pursuits. The goal is to open opportunities, not close them down.

Sarah Devlin directs the Marine Trades Accreditation Program at the ABYC Foundation. (Read about the new MTAP directory on page 74.) She recalls the “tracking” she experienced in school in the 1980s. “I tested well, so I couldn’t take vocational courses. I’m still upset about that,” she says. “At the same time, there were people put in the vocational program because they didn’t test well. That kind of tracking doesn’t exist anymore, and I can tell you that CTE is really gaining a lot of smart students. CTE studies get them into the workforce faster, and the return on investment is much nicer.”

The Education Data Initiative estimates that the average cost of one year of college in the United States is $38,270. “Considering student loan interest and loss of income, investing in a bachelor’s degree can ultimately cost in excess of $500,000.” Yes, there are studies that demonstrate the difference in average lifetime earnings between those with a college degree and those with only a high school diploma. But like a monthly gym membership, the investment in a degree only pays off if you use it. On the losing side of that bet are people with advanced degrees and crushing loans who work in jobs that require minimum skills and pay accordingly.

A young person today who wants to build a life around boats, for pleasure or profit, or both, doesn’t have to land a highly selective university spot to get there when rewarding opportunities in marine service technology have never been greater. There’s hardly a marine service business in the country that wouldn’t hire one or more skilled technicians today if they could find them. Within the broad marine industry, the building and selling of boats can be a volatile roller-coaster, tied to interest rates, the stock market, and lately tariffs. But historically through all those cycles, the business of servicing boats holds steady. In fact, when new-boat sales are down, marine technicians are often in greater demand as boat owners choose to refit their existing boats.

“You can go through a good tech school for anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000,” says Snyder. “Once you get out, that’s manageable. Or you can come out of high school with minimal experience, find a good dealership, they can grow you right through the dealership, and you can start making money right away. In coastal Florida, a technician with five years’ experience can be pulling down six figures pretty easily. In less dense areas it’s not going to be as much, but the cost of living drops, too.”

In the end, says Snyder, it’s also about something else. “There’s nothing more satisfying to a technician than taking a motor apart, putting it all back together, and hearing it run for the first time. It gets you the confidence outside of what you’re working on immediately – something you can apply to your personal life, or even to a different industry. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I did that.’”