John Yank is a man who loves wooden boats, loves them from their mahogany skins down to their white oak ribs. He likes to build boats out of wood because it is difficult, and because it’s a skill that fits his natural intelligence, which moves quickly and thrives on the look and feel of things in his hands.

Recently, Yank was asked how he learned to build a boat in the first place.

“You just know from knowing,” said Yank, founder and owner of Yank Marine in Tuckahoe, in Cape May County.

Yank is 79, though in conversation he prefers to claim a round-sounding 80. He has spent most of the last five decades building boats out of materials other than wood, first fiberglass, then steel, because that is what his customers wanted.

His latest project is his biggest ever: a fleet of five high-speed, aluminum-hulled ferries that will spend their lives hustling commuters between New Jersey and Manhattan.

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Yank’s new ferries are minor marvels. Their structural pieces were cut using jets of water as powerful as a laser. The two boats completed so far feature twin turbocharged diesels generating 2,300 horsepower apiece. Each motor is crammed into one half of a catamaran hull capable of sailing beyond the protected waters of New York Harbor out into the Atlantic Ocean.

“Sometimes I can’t believe it, all the stuff we learned and did,” he said.

Maybe the most unlikely thing Yank did was stay in business. When he was a young man, dozens of shipyards operated along New Jersey’s bays and rivers. Most have consolidated or closed. A few of the old yards remain, focusing on repairs. Others, including Henriques Yachts in Bayville and Viking Yacht in Tuckerton, build pleasure boats.

That leaves Yank Marine as the last company in New Jersey building commercial boats from keel to pilothouse.

“John Yank’s yard is way, way, way down there,” said Arthur Imperatore, owner of NY Waterway, the Weehawken-based ferry company that paid Yank $11 million for five new boats. “But it’s in New Jersey, which is easier than building in other parts of the United States.”

For most of his career, Yank’s effort to keep his shipyard open and his workers paid kept him exceedingly busy. It forced him to modernize along with his clients, who came to prefer steel’s toughness or aluminum’s lightness over the soft beauty of wood.

Slowly, and a little haphazardly, Yank’s business grew busy on metal. His heart never did.

“For what we’re doing, aluminum works,” he said. “But I do miss wood.”

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The borrowed sawmill

When John Yank was growing up in Tuckahoe in the 1950s, the easiest means of escape was by water or by train.

Yank chose water.

The town sits on the south bank of the Tuckahoe River, which twists its way into Great Egg Harbor Bay and the Atlantic. Yank built his first boat for the river when he was 13. He designed and named it after the Gullywhumper, a bathtub-shaped dinghy from the Davy Crockett television show.

The job required stealth. Yank had no money for lumber or tools. He did have a friend whose father owned a sawmill. So they walked together into the woods to chop pine trees. When his friend’s father left town for a job building homes in Ocean City, Yank and his buddies hauled in the lumber, fired up the mill, and cut wood for their boat.

The borrowed sawmill proved so effective that Yank used it for a few more boats, which he sold to neighbors. The original dinghy he kept for hunting, fishing and messing around.

“We had a very small outboard motor and a wooden ironing board,” he said. “We attached the board to the boat with a rope, and we rode around the river on that.”

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When he was still 13, Yank got his first job at a boatyard. He swept the yards and shops until he turned 14, when he was allowed to use tools. Then the shipyard owners taught him wood. They instructed him to cut the fattest white oak trees he could find.

“We waited till the leaves were mostly off and the sap was out,” he said. “That way they lasted a lot longer and they didn’t rot as much.”

The grain in the center grew hard and straight, so it was used for a boat’s skeleton, its keel and ribs. Hulls were planked in mahogany. To form the curves, lumber was placed in a steam box heated by wood or coal.

“In the steam box we used water but also a little bit of antifreeze,” Yank said. “They bent so easy it was just unbelievable.”

Metal empire, wooden heart

By the time he founded Yank Marine in 1969, most clients wanted boats made of fiberglass or steel instead of wood. Yank taught himself to design boats using new materials. Eventually his wife convinced him to advertise in trade journals, and she dragged him to boat conventions.

“John didn’t really care for any of that, going to the shows and doing marketing,” Bette Jean said. “But it worked.”

Yank met new customers, who asked him to build dinner cruise ships, tugboats and commercial fishing boats. Eventually the Yanks bought an old shipyard on the Maurice River, which runs deeper than the Tuckahoe. They bought a huge, 820-ton lift to haul bigger boats from the water.

“Now he has more work than he knows what to do with,” Bette Jean said.

The order from NY Waterway is Yank’s biggest yet. The first two ferries, christened the Betsy Ross and the Molly Pitcher, have fast engines and comfortable seats for the long ride from Belford in Monmouth County to Manhattan and Jersey City. Three more ferries will have smaller engines and more bench seats for the shorter trips across the Hudson River.

The first ferry bound for the Hudson is scheduled to be delivered this April. On a recent tour the boat dominated the Yank Marine yard, its unpainted skin reflecting the sunlight as a dozen workers welded body pieces and shaved rough aluminum smooth. The other two ferries should be complete by 2021.

“A couple of days with warm temperatures and wood starts to expand, so you have to saw and plane it,” Yank said. “With aluminum all the pieces come pre-cut, and it all fits just like it’s drawn on the paper.”

Don’t be fooled. Wood is hard work, and John Yank misses it. Standing on his tower of shiny metal, Yank looked across the quiet stretch of Tuckahoe River where he first launched the Gullywhumper.

He hopes he can get back out there while there’s still time.

“When I retire, I’m going to do some more wooden boat building,” he said. “This is all really exciting. But I’m ready to retire.”

Email: maag@northjersey.com