Hinckley, the Inventor of the NE Picnic Boat

While Hacker was racing runabouts in Lake Michigan, in 1928, Benjamin Hinckley was buying a small boatyard in Southwest Harbor, Maine. In 1932 Benjamin’s son, Henry Hinckley, a Cornell engineering graduate, took control of the company. Even though their first boat was a 33-foot fisherman’s motorboat, they immediately turned to sailboats, mass-producing a 28-foot Sparkman & Stephens sloop. In the 40s, Hinckley turned away from boatbuilding, opening Manset Marine Supply Co., designing fittings for fuel tanks, stanchions and deck plates. During WWII, Hinckley manufactured war-designed boats, contributing 40% of all the war boats built in Maine, for which he was awarded the Army-Navy E for Excellence.

In 1945, the Sou’wester Sailboat was created, becoming the largest fleet of single design cruising boats of its time. In the 50s, Hinckley was one of the early companies to experiment with fiberglass, releasing his first fiberglass sailboat in 1959. The last Hinckley-built wooden boat was built in 1960, named the Osprey. Hinckley continued to focus on fiberglass boats, both sailboats and motorboats, retiring their wooden boat production for the time being. In 1979, Henry Hinckley sold the company to Richard Tucker, however when Hinckley died just a year later, his son Bob Hinckley

bought it back with his business partner Shepard McKenney.

In the mid-1990s the boatyard needed to expand, along with sales and service, to keep up with demand for its new products, So Bob Hinckley sold the company to William Bain, Ralph Willard, and Alexander Spaulding. The new owners did what Hinckley had hoped: They took the boat builder to the next level, developing more advanced fiberglass construction techniques called dual guard and sold powerboats with jet drives.

Around this same time, Bob Hinckley and his partner came up with the concept for the Picnic Boat, their best-selling boat of all time. According to an article in Power and Motor Yachts, “One thing we used to talk about was how sad it was that there were people out there with beautiful wooden boats tired of folding hundred-dollar bills and stuffing them in the seams to keep them afloat,” remembers Bennett. “We thought, why can’t you take all that beauty and aesthetic and put it together with the technology of a new one?

Shep McKenney saw that most boats were used as dayboats. “I felt that if you could create something that was elegantly beautiful—a dayboat with ease of operation, shallow draft—there might be a large market for it.” The timing couldn’t have been better. Just as the financial crisis hit, there was an affordable yacht alternative. The Picnic Boat was the talk of the boat shows with its high performance, unique drive system, and retro looks. It out-performed all sales expectations, selling 200 of the original version, then changed the cabin top and deck and called it the EP for Extended Pilothouse, selling 200 more!

In 2000, Hinckley opened a new 38,000-square-foot production facility in Trenton, Maine where half of its Maine employees work. They also opened sales and service centers in Florida and Germany and bought Little Harbor Yachts in Portsmouth, R.I., for the popular Picnic cruisers.