THE DIFFERENCE MAINE
The sun is just rising over the mountains. It’s a still summer morning. We drive along a sleepy Maine road in the town of Raymond and pull into a gravel parking lot beside a large building. A salty looking, veteran employee raises the flags—the American flag, Maine state flag and lastly the blue Sabre flag, the type I’ve seen at boat shows for years. Yet, we’re a long way from the glitz and glamour of a Lauderdale or Miami show.
The bell rings. It’s 6:00 a.m. and employees file through large garage doors. At 6:01, the morning air is filled with the scream of a bandsaw, the whirl of a buffer and the thud of a hammer. It’s been 13 hours since these workers and the team clocked out the day before. They didn’t skip a beat. They’re on a 10-day build cycle, meaning not that it takes 10 days to build a boat, but that a new boat is completed and moves off the line every 10 days. The schedule is as ambitious as this workforce and the facility allow. There’s no room, time or patience for staffers
