Dennis Anderson: Crestliner says volatile boat biz takes on water

LITTLE FALLS, MINN. — Bryan Burns walked through the Crestliner manufacturing plant here, a fresh face among the 180 seasoned employees who build some of the world's best aluminum boats. "The age of people in the shop probably averages in the 50s," Burns said. "Our employees have been here a while, and they're good at what they do."

This was on Thursday morning, and Burns, the Crestliner president, was showing a visitor around the manufacturing facility that the boat builder's parent company, Brunswick Corp., said earlier this week it would close.

"It was a very difficult thing to do," Burns said. "A difficult decision to make that affected a lot of good people."

Brunswick also owns Lund Boat Co. in New York Mills, Minn., about an hour's drive from Little Falls, and production of most Crestliners will shift there. The crafting of Triton boats, meanwhile -- mostly "modified V" aluminum bass boats built in Little Falls -- will move to a plant in Missouri, while Crestliner's pontoon boat production will be repositioned to Indiana and Missouri.

Burns has been at the helm of Crestliner less than four years. But on the factory floor he moves comfortably among the company's specialty welders, painters and assemblers, addressing each by name.

"I didn't grow up in a boating family," he said, "but since my wife and I have moved here, we've really come to love it and appreciate boating as a great family sport."

Historically, Little Falls has been defined equally by boat building and the Mississippi River, on whose banks this central Minnesota town of about 8,000 sits.

Crestliner is the big name here, of course, and has been since the 1950s. Also there's Larson boats and, in times past, Larson-Crestliner and a handful of others -- a representative collection of which is gathered, museum-like, in a plain warehouse a few miles from the Crestliner plant.

The warehouse and its fleet of gleaming, vintage boats are owned by John Monahan, who in many ways is Burns' mirror opposite.

A Little Falls native whose family was in the retail marine business there, Monahan seems consumed by all things Crestliner and Larson. Not the new stuff, but the old. The Larson Falls Flyer, for instance, a 1950s-era runabout, and also the earliest Crestliners, with their shiny aluminum and trademark red paint.

"Little Falls is where people stopped when they traveled 'up north' in the '50s and '60s, and where many of them bought boats," Monahan said. Now Monahan trades in those boats, each restored to Bristol condition, and also buys and sells old Johnson and Evinrude outboards.

Some day, Monahan says, a boat builder might again inhabit the soon-to-be-abandoned Crestliner plant. The marine business, he suggests, with its ups and downs, is characterized alternately by big profits and equally big losses.

Nearly shuttered in 1980, Crestliner was pulled from the brink by five of its employees.

"We mortgaged ourselves to the hilt to buy it," said Jerry Thomes, 65, from his winter home in Arizona. "We bought it from AMF, and when we started, we had only 25 employees. When we sold it to Irwin Jacobs in 1988, we had 450. If you look at the history of boating, there are usually three or four good years, followed by a down year or two. We have been in a long uphill business climb, which is unusual in boating. We all knew that if the economy turned down, it would crash."

Brunswick bought Crestliner, Lund and Lowe boats from Jacobs in 2004. The recession followed, and few industries have been hit as hard as boating.

With its 17 boat brands and Mercury outboards, Brunswick has felt the pain. Deeply. Its fourth-quarter 2009 net boat sales were off 38 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, with a quarterly operating loss for the boat division of $58 million -- about the same red ink it bled in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Thus the closing of the Little Falls plant.

"We've offered many of our employees the opportunity to work in the New York Mills plant, and in Missouri," Burns said. "These are good-paying jobs, and it's specialized work. We've offered to help move 55 employees, and we hope they join us."

With that, Burns excused himself. It was a busy Thursday morning, and he and his engineering staff were finalizing the design of a new Crestliner 16-footer, a craft "unlike anything fishermen have seen before," he said.

On such hopes, boat building has floated in central Minnesota for generations, and perhaps always will, plant closing or not.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com