My first time at Portland Yacht Service (PYS) and Portland Shipyard surprised me. Up on the hard was the late Barry Matthews’s 110-ton seiner the Ocean Venture. It seemed like a lot of boat to get up on blocks in a yard, but in fact far below the capacity of the PSY’s 330-ton travellift. Looking around more, I saw the yard was full of everything from 100-foot schooners to 40-foot tuna boats and a couple of acres of small pleasure boats.

According to service manager, Rob Benson, commercial fishing vessels make up about a quarter of the yard’s business. “Phineas Sprague started the yard in 1981,” says Benson. “I came to work for him in 2002 when we were still down on Fore St., then we moved up here.”

The PYS yard and numerous service and storage buildings, occupies 23 acres between Portland’s Commercial Street and the estuary of the Fore River, which opens into Casco Bay. “For the commercial fleet, we mostly provide winter storage,” says Benson. “We maintain a lot of the tuna boats, and we do most of the work on the Shafmaster boats.”

According to Benson, the yard does shafting work, among other things, on the fleet of offshore lobster boats owned by Jonathan Shafmaster in nearby New Hampshire. “We replace all the cutlass bearings every year. We have one coming in next week.”

While the yard offers welding service, Beson reports that contractors do most of the commercial work. “Phoenix welding is ABS-certified; they do most of our contract work,” says Benson. “And fishermen get their own contractors a lot of the time, they try to save money.”

Most of the yard work on the commercial side of the yard is done outside. “Some of the guys have found the advantages of working inside, but there’s a cost,” says Benson. He points to a new building going up near the commercial boats. “The entry on that one is 60 feet tall.”

Besides welding, the yard has a carpentry shop and an outboard shop. “There’s a new Mercury we’re getting that only the lower unit turns, the motor itself doesn’t, so you can put multiple engines close to each other.”

Phineas Sprague spent four years circumnavigating the world before he started the yard, and sailboats are a major part of the work at Portland Yacht, particularly vessels from Maine’s windjammer fleet, the schooners that take passengers for hire when the weather warms. “That’s a replica of the Columbia,” Benson says, pointing to a 2014 version of a famous Gloucester fishing schooner built in 1923 and lost off Nova Scotia in 1927.

While the City of Portland is proud of its working waterfront and goes to great lengths to preserve it, the infrastructure needed to keep the commercial fleet going is expensive; sharing that cost with yachts makes it all possible. “We couldn’t do it with just the commercial fishing boats,” says Benson, noting, however, that they are a vital part of the mix.