SkipperLiner, the La Crosse, Wis.-based commercial boat and custom houseboat builder, may be in trouble again.
The La Crosse Tribune is reporting that the company “appears to have closed again,” ceasing operations during the last week of September.
Officials with the company, including owner Jeb Griffith and his son, executive vice-president Peter Griffith, did not return calls seeking comment, but a SkipperLiner operator told WorkBoat a week after the Tribune report that the company’s office was still open. A 24-hour live support chat room on the company’s Website was also up and running at press time.
Jeb Griffith, who launched what would become the multimillion-dollar Winnebago Software in 1982, acquired SkipperLiner in the fall of 2010.
In April 2010, the company, with a staff that had been reduced from about 90 to around 40, closed down its boatbuilding operation. It filed for Chapter 128 receivership in La Crosse County Circuit Court.
Just before completing the 2010 acquisition six months later, Griffith said he wanted to retain the SkipperLiner brand and had little interest in offering pre-designed vessels.
“We have no intention of coming up with an inexpensive houseboat that is X feet long and X number of feet wide, and to just crank them out,” Griffith told the Tribune at the time, “because you end up with a lot of them on your lot.”
Instead Griffith said he wanted to work with buyers to design and build houseboats suiting the individual desires of each customer.
The company’s financial picture appeared to brighten by the spring of 2011 after SkipperLiner resumed its boatbuilding operations and Griffith secured an agreement with the La Crosse County Economic Development Fund to repay some $754,000 loaned by the county to the company’s previous owner.
SkipperLiner also builds commercial passenger vessels and other workboats. — Garry Boulard
