Fathers, Sons and the Weight of Legacy

Story and Photos by Daniel Harding Jr.

A visit to Michael Rybovich and Sons offers a glimpse into the past–and future–of the family business that invented the sportfisherman.

Ghosts from the past stand frozen in time on the cedar-planked walls of Michael Rybovich’s office. Part place of business, part maritime museum, Michael stands to my left and looks on at a wall adorned with black and white photos. There are images of his father and uncles, son Dusty and even author Ernest Hemingway. Inset in a gold frame is a photo of the man that started it all, his grandfather John, standing beside his wife Anna.

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John Rybovich Sr.’s story is the tale of an immigrant who, at just 16 left Austro-Hungary on a ship for New York, destination: Ellis Island. Despite his young age, Sr. was already a skilled carpenter; his practiced hands helped him earn work first in New York and then in a burgeoning paradise he heard about on a job site—a destination called Florida.

“He found out he couldn’t work during the winter because the blue bloods that were down here enjoying paradise didn’t want to hear any construction noise, of course,” says Michael in a meeting area that overlooks his marina. “So, during the summer season, he had to find another way to make a living. So, he got himself a small boat and started commercial fishing.”

Word spread of how well he maintained his boat, and that combined with his carpentry skills segued into a side business working on other vessels. This would lead him to open a small yard on 40th street in West Palm Beach. As the yard’s reputation and prominence grew, so did his family. He and Anna would have five children; three boys (John, Thomas and Emil–Michael’s father) and two daughters (Ethel and Mary) all of whom worked in the family business to varying extents.

“That was the European model at the time,” says Michael with a laugh. “Kids were free labor, and they were a damn good deal.” They were working as soon as they could pick up something heavy. For the eldest son, John Jr., that would begin at the age of 10; he quit school and became a full-time employee at 16. Besides muscle and sweat, John Jr. brought a budding interest in offshore fishing; an interest that would breed innovation.

“The Rybovich yard became known for the place to go if you were going to come down here and go sportfishing,” says Michael. “In the early days, we weren’t building anything. We were converting a lot of cruisers to sportfishing applications like mounting outriggers and fighting chairs [innovations that they pioneered] and placing controls up on top of the deck house.”

Things were moving onwards and upwards for the boatyard until World War II broke out. All three of John’s boys enlisted. John Jr. worked in purchasing and acquisition for the Army, Emil would serve in a tailor-fitted role in the Air Corps’ air-sea rescue boats, rescuing downed airmen and maintaining the fleet. Tommy famously flew B-17 bombers and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroically flying a “flak-battered airplane back to base with the control cables shot out to save the lives of his injured crewmembers who could not have survived parachuting from the crippled bomber.”

At the conclusion of the war, all three boys returned to the family business with a renewed passion and plenty of new ideas.

“They’d had plenty of time to think and plenty of time to be exposed to the military way of doing things and new innovative materials that were available through their military service,” says Michael. “They came back ready to set the world on fire, and that’s when a customer came in and said, ‘I want you to build me a boat, and these are the dimensions I want and I’m gonna leave everything else up to you.’”

That owner was auto-giant Charlie Johnson and his boat, Miss Chevy II would forever change sportfishing.

“And to this day the custom sportfishing industry is known for its ­super high quality and high-performance boating,” says Michael proudly. “What the custom sportfishermen do is far more advanced as far as performance goes than the cruising market. So, all of this came about from an Austro-Hungarian immigrant and his sons, and I have to give credit to his daughters as well, because while the boys were off at war, his daughters ran that company.”

Often overshadowed by the spotlight of hull number one, in many ways, it was hull two from the Rybovich family that has an even more interesting origin story thanks to her owner, Al Capone’s, well, let’s call him employee, Tony Accardo. Accardo, aka “Joe Batters” (so called for his proficiency with a baseball bat, and not on a field with a ball either) or “Big Tuna” for his love of fishing (not a euphemism that we know of) is said to have been involved in organized crime from his teenage years until his passing at 86 years old.

Upon seeing Miss Chevy II, the passionate tuna fisherman went to the Rybovich family and commissioned the same boat, only this time bigger. Thus, the 37-foot Clari Joe–three feet longer than her predecessor–was born. “Those additional feet made a big difference in her profile,” says Michael. “I was told he was a gentleman. I wasn’t on the planet yet, but I heard he was a fixture at the yard. He always paid his bills on time, and he always paid in cash.”

It just so happened that at the time of my visit, Clari-Jo, now aptly renamed Legend, was once again getting work done by the Rybovich family. I followed Michael under her cover. Despite previous refits and a repower in 2009, the 74-year-old boat retains much of its historical authenticity. I lingered at the lower helm for a moment and tried to imagine Accardo backing the boat down on a giant tuna while soaking up the sun and escaping the pressure of his “day job.”

“Man, if this boat could talk, huh?” I say to Michael as we climb out. He simply nods his head in quiet agreement.

Following Michael as we walk down the docks to tour the rest of the yard, it’s hard to picture him doing anything else. He seems so at home around the fleet and employees that I can scarcely even imagine him out buying groceries or watching a movie. In a way, boatyards have always been his home.

As a kid, Michael and his siblings would run around the yard “trying to mess with grandpa,” who thought children not on the payroll were nothing but a distraction. Still, Michael remembers his grandfather as a sweet man whom he would understand and appreciate more later in life when he joined the family business.

What his grandfather may have lacked in attention and affection, his grandmother made up for. “My grandmother couldn’t get enough of her grandchildren,” says Michael. “And so, we spent a lot of time with grandma up at the house. The house was at the boatyard because they had homesteaded that property and then built a small yard and watched it grow; we would run up and spend time with grandma, who was just the most loving person I’ve ever known. We really enjoyed spending time with her; she would spoil us with cookies and coke, sliced mangoes and hugs.”

When asked when and how he got his own start in the family business, Michael says, “I kind of backed into it the way my grandfather did. I was told by my mother and father that I was to go off to college. And when I got out of college, I was to earn a good living so that I could take care of them when they got old. Once again, the European model; it was never brought up at any family conversation that I would go to work at the boatyard.”

After a couple years in college, Michael came home and was quickly running out of money. “I went to my dad one day and I said, ‘Uh, dad, do you think I could go to work at the boatyard?’ And he looked at me in disbelief because he never, ever thought that would happen. And I was 19 years old. Then he said, ‘You know, Michael, I always wished you would. You go home, you get a haircut and you come on in tomorrow morning and we’ll get you set up.’”

Michael explains that his father had the good sense of having him begin at the bottom—literally—of the business so he started out on the haul-out crew working for a man named Marshall Ray, who knew him since he was in diapers. Under Ray’s watchful eye, Michael learned about pulling props and shafts and painting bottoms. His father seemed content to leave him as a permanent member of the “bottom gang,” but his Uncle Hal had the foresight to move him to the new construction side of the business.

As an informal apprentice Michael would mix glue, hold boards and generally soak up the skills needed in boat building. After a few years there, his apprenticeship would come to an abrupt end. When the longtime carpentry foreman retired, his uncle thrust his nephew into that role—at only 25 years old.

“When I look back on it, it was humorous,” says Michael. “When I was in the midst of it, it was a real challenge for a kid to be supervising and organizing a crew of extremely talented journeymen craftsman. Naturally, there was resentment because of the nepotism element, and not only nepotism, but just, Who is this punk kid? What the hell does he know? I would’ve felt the same way. So, the only thing I could do was work my ass off to gain their respect. And that’s what I did. And eventually those guys came around to it and I got the respect.”

I ask what advice he gives to his sons from those early challenges. “It takes hard work. I got two boys here that are working with me, Dusty and Alex, and I relay to them that when you are working with skilled people who’ve been doing something all their life, you’re not going to gain their respect simply by being who you are. That’s not gonna happen. And it shouldn’t happen. You’re gonna have to prove yourself. I think that comes in handy as I slowly passed this torch.”

Ever following the European model set forth by his grandfather, the torch, it seems is destined to land in the hands of Dusty and Alex. Unlike with Michael, Dusty’s future seemed preordained from the time he was young. In fact, Dusty would become the first Rybovich to earn a degree in naval architecture and design from the prestigious Webb Institute in New York.

Dusty, now 35, says the plan was for him to always end up back in the family business, but both he and Michael thought it would be beneficial to earn experience building boats outside of the family compound. He worked, for a time, for a naval architect in New Orleans and then at Contender Boats before he got the call to return home in 2013.

I asked if, in the beginning, there was friction between him and his father as he brought back new ideas and construction methods. Dusty laughs and says, “There still is, yeah. School teaches you one way of doing things and then you see how we’ve been doing things forever. It’s good for me to know the tried-and-true [cold molded] methods and have a formal engineering background. As you mesh the two together it works out really well.”

In recent years, Dusty’s role has morphed from being design-heavy to becoming more of a project manager for the new boat side while his brother Alex, looks after the also-thriving refit business across the yard.

I ask if there’s any sibling rivalry and how he balances working with his brother. “Technically he’s my stepbrother; we’re only 51 weeks apart in age,” Dusty says. “Our parents got married when we were real young so we grew up together and we’ve been good friends our entire lives.”

Dusty says his childhood, like his father’s before him, was a happy one. He and his many siblings would run around the yard picking up screws and swinging hammers. He was never overtly pushed into the family business, but he says he did feel an unspoken pull to pick up the mantle: “There was an expectation.”

So, is there a certain pressure that comes from his last name and his family’s storied legacy? On that, Dusty doesn’t mince words, “Absolutely. Yes. I tell people it’s a blessing and curse. You have a world-renowned reputation for a quality product. It’s something you can step back and be proud of, but there are plenty of modern challenges to face as well, like the decline in skilled labor.”

With planking going on a jig for a 42-footer behind him, our conversation turns to the unrelenting future. Dusty sees the sands of time being unkind to diesel engines in the decades ahead as the march towards alternative fuel sources speeds up as a result of stricter regulations. He also predicts that stabilization technology, both static and dynamic, will play a growing role in the future of boatbuilding, and that sonar technology will improve. “You know, someday there will probably be something the size of a pencil eraser on the bottom of your boat that can map everything for 25 miles around,” he says.

“And what about the future of Rybovich, do you hope to grow the company?” I ask.

“We could do that right now. We could tool up, become a full production facility, try to spread our name into the production world but you just kind of cheapen everything with those numbers,” he says. “Nothing against the production guys, but the level of quality we have here that we have attached to our name—you can’t give that kind of attention to detail if you’ve got a hundred boats a year going out the door. I mean we’ve gotta be involved in every decision in every boat. It’s too much work for one person. And then you start letting go of that kind of decision making and you give it to people who don’t necessarily have to stand behind the name.”

With palm fronds swaying in the breeze and the quiet of the yard being interrupted by the return of 40-ish workers from lunch, I again find Michael running like a squirrel though the yard while simultaneously fielding calls and shaking hands. With four new boats in various stages of build at one end of the yard and iconic boats from the past like Legend resting in a slip at the other end and two of his sons leading different initiatives, Michael is literally and figuratively standing between the past and future of one of the most storied boatbuilders in American history. I ask him, “What has boatbuilding brought to your life?”

“When I croak, whenever that happens,” he replies with a laugh, “I’ve left something here. And I feel sorry for people who can’t say that. I feel special in a way. Not that I’m better than anybody else, I don’t mean that—I feel like I’ve been given that gift. That when I’m gone, what I’ve done here will live on. It makes me uncomfortable when I think about sometimes, that I have that gift. Whether you want to believe it’s a gift from the good Lord, or its fate or it’s an accident, I don’t know. But I feel like that’s something that makes my life different than other people.”

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This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/sportfishing/michael-rybovich-and-sons-profile-and-tour