Hummers of the Sea: Moose Boats of Petaluma

Cruising past the Port Sonoma Marina on CA-37, you wouldn’t suspect that a shipwright of epic proportions is cloaked by the serenity of the Petaluma River. With customers such as the New York Police Department, the New Orleans Fire Department and the U.S. Navy, Moose Boats has been producing extraordinary catamarans for the past 10 years.

Roger Fleck, president of Moose Boats, envisioned the first Moose Boat over a decade ago after he and his wife built Halcyon, a 44-foot wooden sailboat. It was a wooden boat, but it taught me a lot about fundamentals of construction, he said. With a solid background in industrial design, Fleck began to envision an aluminum, double-hull, twin-diesel waterjet-propelled catamaran-style vessel—big, sturdy and tough, ideal for rocky northwest waters.

Fleck built a scale model of his original vision on his own. Then, he found a boat builder in Victoria, British Columbia to build the full-size version—and the original Moose was born. Fleck had built about four Moose boats by the time he brought his first prototype to the 2001 International WorkBoat Show in New Orleans, a trade show that happened shortly after September 11, 2001.

We felt there was going to be a need for more security boats, said Fleck. We didn’t really have a clear idea of why we took it to New Orleans. It was an intuition.

Fleck’s intuition turned out to be a keen one. It was at this tradeshow where Fleck was approached by U.S. Navy and later signed a federal contract, the first of many, to build a half dozen harbor security boats.

The Navy was not a company that Fleck had been soliciting for business. That was at a time when the Navy was under a mandate following both the USS Cole bombing in Yemen and September 11 to buy up a lot more small, maneuverable patrol crafts, said Abbie Walther, vice president and general manager of Moose Boats. They found us in the aisles of the workboat show; there was a lot about the configuration that appealed to them. Fleck added, We just happened to have a boat that was exactly what they were looking for.

Moose Boats has now delivered 32 boats to the Navy, representing about 50 percent of the firm’s business to date. With such quick maneuverability, double-hull stability and aggressive-looking design, Moose Boats has found other success across the country building vessels for law enforcement, fire and rescue, and port security. Three Moose boats were present in response to the Miracle on the Hudson; Tiburon Fire used their Moose Boat at the Angel Island fire several years ago.

Just this year Moose Boats released their first mono-hull design—a smaller, narrower boat that offers lower cost and more opportunity. Our catamaran design is bigger than maybe some cities can manage in terms of harbor patrol, Walther said.

And the mono-hull is still a Moose boat, held to all the same standards. We’ve been compared to the Hummer of the sea by previous magazines and trade publications, and that is not inaccurate in terms of what we’re shooting for, Walther said. We build everything to military standards, regardless of whether the customer is federal or not, we just apply them across the board.

Despite all this success, having built 66 boats to date, Moose Boats is still a relatively small company. It doesn’t take a lot of boats to keep us pretty busy, said Fleck, but there are some perks. The boat that was on paper at one time, six months later, we’re driving it up the river at 40 knots—we get to drive it under the Golden Gate Bridge at speed. And Moose Boats builds everything from scratch, which is pretty rare for the Bay Area. It’s almost like an old hot-rod mentality, says Fleck. The reward is pretty old-fashioned. It’s a hands-on business.

Keep your radar on Fleck and his Moose Boats at www.mooseboats.com.