Enduring Legacy: A Profile of Boat Designer Dave Livingston
Enduring Legacy
Despite his relative obscurity, Dave Livingston is one of the most accomplished boat designers in the world. And he’s far from finished.
Earlier this year, 83-year-old designer Dave Livingston was honored with the prestigious Charles Chapman Award at the Miami Boat Show for six decades worth of boating innovations. It’s hard to believe, but even with that kind of longstanding career, and countless contributions long since patented, some in attendance at the National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA) breakfast might not have recognized the name. However, they certainly would be familiar with the boats he helped pen for brands like Bayliner, Reinell, Wellcraft and Regal, among others.
While the presentation might have been a retrospective look at his past accomplishments, Dave isn’t calling it quits anytime soon. In fact, his idea of retirement is to keep sketching boats for Fluid Motion, a company he founded with his son, John, in the early 2000s. As the Head of Design and Product Development, Dave oversees R&D for 15 models across three brands. And no, that title is not an honorific. For a mechanical inventor with every excuse to rest on his laurels, Dave rarely takes a vacation. The 60-mile commute from his home to the facility, located just north of Seattle, isn’t exactly close, either.
“I live eight miles away and he beats me here almost every day,” admits Sam Bisset, Fluid Motion’s VP of Marketing. Not only is Dave’s presence felt in the shop Monday through Friday, but he still puts his stamp of approval on every boat produced by Ranger Tugs, Cutwater and Solara. Adorning the walls are an additional 12 years’ worth of concepts penned by Dave’s hand. “We can’t build ‘em fast enough,” says John Livingston, Dave’s son. “He draws ‘em faster than we can build ‘em.”
Dave also has a history of racing them faster than they could conceivably go. Taking up valuable real estate in Fluid Motion’s engineering department is a wooden hydroplane with a forest green 40-horspower Mercury Thunderbolt engine and a plastic Halloween skeleton installed in the driver’s seat.
As a young daredevil, Dave built this hydroplane to compete in the Sammamish Slough Race, a grueling marathon up the winding, treacherously narrow, 13-mile Sammamish River. He also competed in its offshoot, the Golden Water Ski Race, which culminated near the Sand Point Yacht Club on Seattle’s Lake Washington waterfront. The race’s innocuous-sounding name hardly belies the scrum of water-skiers that would fly up the river at speeds of 65 mph, pulled by runabouts jockeying for first place. If the course’s exposed bridge pilings and deadheads didn’t get you, then the competition just might.
“They’d get in between you and try to knock you off,” remembers Dave. The outboard they used—an alcohol-burning, four-cylinder Mercury—was on loan from his cousin. “It was better when I water-skied and he ran the boat, because I was lighter,” he adds, recounting their unconventional start. “He would open it up from the dock and take off, and I just tried to time the whir of the engine with the ski line and just take a big jump. You’d sort of lay on your back and you hope that you made it.”
Taking a leap of faith was nothing new for Dave, whose career might best be described as a series of unconventional starts. After serving in the Navy for four years, he returned home to finish his studies in mechanical engineering. His father, who came down with cancer, passed away when Dave was 15. Though his family never had enough money to buy a boat of their own, Dave applied his passion to various enterprises: first by building a small plywood runabout whose schematics he found in the pages of Popular Mechanics, and later at the naval departments of both Nickum & Spaulding and Lockheed Martin.
Shortly after, he designed and built his first commercially successful vessel in a chicken coop in West Seattle, Washington. At the time, Susan, Dave’s wife, was pregnant with John—but that didn’t stop her from laminating the 8-foot catamaran hulls by hand. Dave originally went with the name Sunliner, but everyone referred to them as Livingstons. The name stuck.
Livingston Boat Company’s dinghies were heavily influenced by the confines of their modest apartment. Their shape, on the other hand, was unlike most hulls at the time. When he exhibited his Livingston Boats at the Seattle Boat Show in 1968, few, if any of the attendees had seen a fiberglass catamaran before. Their stable, utilitarian design made them popular, and 75,000 were produced.
Even though these dinghies provoked a strong public response, they weren’t financially viable for a young family to fabricate by hand. “Making money and building boats … they’re not always in sync,” laments Dave. During the wintertime, when business was slow, he repaired race cars and fixed up boats just to survive. In 1971, he sold Livingston Boats to Reinell. He would also work for them as a consultant and then as a full-time employee, designing everything from the first backlit marine gauges to one of the earliest composite stringer systems ever used in hull construction.
Back then, Reinell was the largest sterndrive boat manufacturer in the U.S. They shared dealerships with Bayliner, a new upstart on the scene in Washington. Dave enjoyed a healthy competition with Bayliner, until he was approached by its founder, John Orin Edson, who offered him a position as the head of design and product development.
Bayliner turbocharged Dave’s career, which rose as precipitously as the company’s market share. The legendary Bayliner executive “Slim” Sommerville remembers Dave as this “wild, crazy, very talented designer.” Together, their internal competition to out-design and out-sell each other drove production to new heights. At one point, they were manufacturing 60 different models, with a total of 50,000 boats being produced each year.
Dave’s most impactful contribution was his work on the Capri, which was later marketed as part of the “Total Value Package.” Boaters could buy a 1900 Capri, a 125-horsepower Force outboard and an Escort trailer for less than $7,000—all designed and built in-house. Dave spearheaded the push to purchase the Chrysler outboard company from auto legend Lee Iacocca, which in turn allowed Bayliner to launch the first OEM engine program. Recreational boats were suddenly affordable, which helped to democratize the sport and change the industry forever. “There are more people on the water in boats that he designed than any other designer in the world,” says Fluid Motion Vice President Jeff Messmer. “That’s Dave’s legacy.”
To make sure his hulls and OEM engines were viable, Dave took to the water with his three children in tow. “That my family ever survived their upbringing is a miracle,” says Dave. “We had engines blowing up in the boat, we had drives coming apart.”
“I always referred to us as the ‘test family,’ because I figured we had dibs on just about every prototype that came out of Bayliner,” adds John. “Later on, when I wisened up a little more in life, I figured out the only reason we got all the test boats is because we were the only family that wasn’t going to sue them if something went wrong.”
Shortly after Bayliner was acquired by Brunswick Corp in 1986., Dave stepped away. For a life-long mechanical enthusiast who had practically grown up with a wrench in his hand, he could finally afford some high-performance toys of his own. He bought a Ford Cobra, a McClaren Can-Am, and a couple Formula 1 cars, and spent nearly a decade racing vintage circuits.
His racing days ended after Dave was approached by Paul Kuck, founder of Regal Boats. Kuck was interested in creating a new stepped hull design to complement their series of family cruisers. His brilliance was in including patented Laminar Flow Interrupters to a stepped hull, or small notches between the forward strakes said to improve cornering at faster speeds.
When the opportunity arose in the early aughts to acquire Ranger Tugs from Howard “Smitty” Smith, John jokingly says tugs were the only type of boat that his father had yet to design. Thankfully, his passion is contagious, with a team of designers ready to pick up the mantle whenever he decides to retire—if that day ever comes.
Looking at his career, Dave says his ability to understand what boaters truly desired from their boats came from his own experiences on the water. “Today, people call it more of an experience, but what you’re really selling is fun,” he tells me. “It’s not always easy to get right, but it certainly keeps you going.”
When I ask him what his proudest contribution to boating is, a devil-may-care smirk materializes on his face. I imagine it to be the same one Sommerville used to see back in the Bayliner days, affixed to the face of someone he described as “a demure fellow who would try anything, running boats in the craziest, wildest fashion.”
“That one’s easy, I’d say this one,” he says putting a hand on John’s shoulder. “People are way more important than the boats.”
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