Viking Yachts

A struggling wooden boatbuilder turned into the world's largest sportfish yard

On April 1, 1964, brothers Bill and Bob Healey bought Peterson-Viking Builders, a small and struggling New Jersey yard building 37-foot wooden sportfishing boats on the Bass River in New Gretna. Bill had grown up in his family's steel business and brought the technical discipline, while Bob, a Camden County lawyer by training, brought the business sense the two had already used to develop the Bass River Marina together. Neither brother set out to build the world's biggest sportfish yard. They set out to build a better boat than the one before it, a line Bill Healey repeated for the rest of his life and one the company still uses as its working philosophy.

The switch from wood to fiberglass came fast, and it is what let Viking scale. By its 60th anniversary on April 1, 2024 the yard had delivered more than 5,500 boats, a figure no other builder of large fiberglass sportfishing yachts anywhere in the world has matched, and Viking now markets itself, correctly, as the largest manufacturer of luxury fiberglass sportfishing yachts on the planet.

A family business that survived the 1990 luxury tax and kept building

Viking's history is not an unbroken success story, and the yard is more credible for saying so itself. The 1990 recession and the 10 percent federal luxury tax on boats over $100,000 that followed in 1991 gutted the American yacht industry, and Viking's own workforce fell from around 1,500 to fewer than 80 employees in the aftermath. The company rebuilt from that low point rather than close, which is part of why multi-generation Viking owners talk about the yard's staying power the way owners of older European brands talk about heritage.

Bill Healey ran the company until October 2013, when he handed the throttles to his son Patrick 'Pat' Healey, who remains president and CEO today. Bill died on August 14, 2025 at 97, and his brother and co-founder Bob Healey Sr. had died in December 2021 at 92. The company they built is still entirely Healey-family owned and run, with Pat's own children active in the business, a continuity buyers weighing a builder's long-term survival tend to notice.

New Gretna, built to build boats fast

Viking's campus on the Bass and Mullica rivers in New Gretna, New Jersey now runs to roughly 880,000 square feet, a scale most car plants would recognize before most boatyards would. The yard employs more than 1,500 people, keeps its own water supply and generates close to half its own electricity on site through microturbines, and builds boats from 45 to 93-plus feet across roughly 30 current sportfishing models, delivering somewhere in the region of 80 to 100 hulls a year depending on the season.

That volume is the whole business case. A Viking owner is not buying a one-off. Every model shares tooling, systems architecture and a dealer and service network built for the number of boats actually on the water, which is why used Vikings resell fast and why captains moving between boats find the layout and the engine room philosophy familiar from one hull to the next.

The default builder of the American tournament fleet

Ask a captain running the East Coast circuit what he wants to be aboard for the White Marlin Open or the Big Rock and Viking's name comes up before any other. United Yacht Sales, one of the largest sportfish brokerages in the country, counted 44 percent of every pre-owned sportfishing yacht sold in the United States in 2024 as a Viking, against 28 percent each for Bertram and Hatteras, out of more than 350 pre-owned sportfish that changed hands that year. No other builder is close.

The competitive picture has narrowed rather than grown crowded. Hatteras has rebuilt its own reputation and Bertram has shaken off the delamination problems that hurt it in the early 2000s, but both now offer a handful of sportfishing models against Viking's roughly 30, and Viking still delivers more hulls a year than the rest of the American convertible market combined. That dominance is also why a Viking, more than most yacht brands, is worth as much for what it is easy to sell as for what it is like to run.