Since the early 1970s, Jock Williams has built hundreds of boats. This summer, his yard, John Williams Boat Company in Mount Desert, Maine, launched a Williams 28 Bass Boat named Sea Shepherds. Sitting at one of the boatyard’s docks on Somes Sound—a yard that Jock built out of an abandoned stone quarry—the 28 fits right in with Maine’s lobster boats.
That’s not a coincidence. The 28’s hull is a Lyford Stanley design. Most of the boats Jock built over the past 50 years were designed by Lyford, a native Mainer who built wooden lobster boats on Mount Desert Island.
Jock is not a native Mainer. He is, as they say in Maine, “from away.” He grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City where his father operated a company that made knitted goods. “We had a very pleasant, easy life,” Jock says.
That easy life included a home on Martha’s Vineyard where Jock’s boating career began at the age of 14, when he was hired to run the new gas dock at Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard in Vineyard Haven.
Jock quickly picked up sailing and shared the gas dock job with his brother. On the weekends, when most of the regattas
