F&S Boatworks, Carolina Flare Meets a SeaCraft Bottom in Delaware

From the docks and the canyons to a boatshed by the canal

F&S is the work of one family rather than a corporation. Jim Floyd trained as a master carpenter, then spent years working the waterfront as a longshoreman. What turned him toward boatbuilding was the 23-foot SeaCraft his family ran, a small outboard boat with a reputation for taking ugly water better than anything its size. When the Floyds moved up to offshore fishing for tuna and billfish off the Northeast, they commissioned several custom boats from Ricky Scarborough Sr. in Wanchese, North Carolina, and Jim used those projects as an apprenticeship in wood-epoxy construction.

In 1996 he started his own first hull, the 59-foot Fin-Ally. The concept he settled on then has not changed since: a tall, flared Carolina-style bow married to the stepped, multi-angle bottom that SeaCraft's Carl Moesly had developed, and the yard eventually worked with Moesly in person. The shop is just south of Bear, Delaware, alongside Summit Marina on the C&D Canal. Jim's nephew John Floyd Jr., who came in as a project manager after finance studies, now runs the company as president.

One bottom, many owners, no assembly line

Nothing at F&S is a production boat. Each hull is drawn and quoted around a single owner and captain, built by hand in wood and epoxy, and finished to that crew's way of fishing. Because the bottom design is shared, the yard spends its creativity on size, power, layout and joinery rather than reinventing the running surface each time. The pitch to owners is ride first.

The fleet list tells the story of the range. The great majority of the roughly 34 hulls are flybridge convertibles, beginning around 50 feet with Epiphany and climbing past 80 feet, and a new 82-foot convertible, hull No. 34, is on the build list now. In 2011 Power and Motoryacht wrote up a 67-foot F&S convertible that ran past 50 mph with a pair of CAT C32A diesels.

Where the express fits in the F&S lineup

Our model page on the F&S Custom Express Sportfish covers the rarest branch of the family, the hardtop boats driven from the main deck. Only a handful exist, chiefly Full Throttle (hull No. 22, a 64-footer with big 16-cylinder MTUs) and Soul Candy (hull No. 30, a 61-foot boat drawn for a family that fishes the Gulf and the Bahamas). They share the convertibles' bottom and wood-epoxy structure, so they are best seen as a lower-profile take on the same yard formula.

Reputation, resale and survey priorities

F&S has no dealer network. New boats are sold directly by the yard, and used ones change hands through sportfish brokers who know the custom market. With so few hulls in circulation, there is no price list to compare against, and each boat is valued on its own size, age, power and care. Among offshore crews the name stands for sea-keeping, which helps resale, but a buyer who wants a widely recognized badge will find Viking or Hatteras easier to sell later.

A survey of any F&S should focus on the things that age a custom wood-epoxy boat:

• Bottom steps and the Kevlar outer skin, checked for impact repairs
• Moisture readings in stringers, bulkheads and engine room plywood
• Diesel hours, oil sampling and records of major services
• Shafts, struts, propellers and rudder bearings
• Gyro stabilizer, generators and air conditioning run under load
• Tower welds, fasteners and mounting points