Miles Thomas News

Island Boats is located on a 6.5-acre site with 30,000 square feet of covered and enclosed shops as well as a 10,000 square foot paint shop along Bayou Teche in New Iberia, La.. With a strong reputation for catamarans and a wide variety of unique aluminum boats delivered from their yard, Island Boats is now building four crewboats. “These are our fist crewboats,” said company president Miles Thomas, “But we have built many different types of vessels from which we can draw design ideas. The boats, a pair each, for two customers, include two 175 x 32 ft.

While the market news from the passenger vessel industry has been anything but bright, a few shipyards are building new facilities to better serve their customer base. One of the best examples is Island Boats, Jeanerette, La., Island Boats formerly was located on a very dry patch of land overlooking Highway 90 near New Iberia, La. . After construction, their vessels had to be trucked to the Port of Iberia, several miles away. "The cost to us and inconvenience to others in the Port was becoming a major problem as our boats got bigger," said Miles Thomas, president of the firm. The firm solved this problem in May by moving to a six acre plot of land that backs up to Bayou Teche, approximately eight miles from the Baldwin Canal that has direct access to the Intercoastal waterway.

In order to preserve Bald Head Island's natural tranquility, its developers have banned cars, and residents have to get around by golf cart and bicycle. Travel to and from the island is by a small fleet of aluminum hulled crew boats. When it came time for the owner's to build a new boat and repower the existing two-cycle boats, they shopped hard and finally settled on Cummins KTA 19M3 engines producing 640 hp each with a Heavy Duty rating. All told, they have ordered six of these well-proven engines. Two will go into a 65-ft. (19.8-m) aluminum boat in January 2003. These will be coupled to ZF665A gears with a 1.75:1 ratio turning 32x34-inch four blade Michigan propellers.