Huckins Yachts for Sale

Huckins has been building on the same water in Jacksonville since 1928, first on East 4th Street and since 1946 on the Ortega River, and it is one of the oldest family owned custom yacht builders in the United States. Frank Pembroke Huckins came out of a New England lumber family and made his name with the Quadraconic hull, one of the first true planing forms, which he put under the Fairform Flyers and which won him a Navy order for two squadrons of PT boats. The company is run today by his granddaughter Cindy Purcell and her husband Buddy Purcell.

What you are buying second hand depends entirely on the decade. The prewar and midcentury boats are wood: triple planked at first, then double diagonal Philippine mahogany from 1947 on a laminated oak keel. From 1960 Huckins was cold molding, which here means the wood hull sheathed in fiberglass, and from the mid 1970s the boats are fiberglass composite core, first AIREX and now Corecell, which made Huckins one of the earliest powerboat builders to go that route. A wooden Huckins is a restoration project or a kept classic and needs a surveyor who works on wood; nothing about a survey of a 1950s Fairform Flyer resembles a survey of a 2015 Huckins 45. The modern boats are one offs, built a handful at a time to an owner's brief, so there is no model to compare against and no two are the same. The great advantage is that the yard is still there, still family run and still holds the records, which is unusual for a builder of this age.