Building boats in High Point had its drawbacks, all right (it was, as had been pointed out, 200 miles from the ocean). In those days, the boats were trucked to Morehead City, with the flying bridge removed so they could drive them under highway bridges. The boats were then pieced together, finished and launched at Cannon Boat Works.

 It soon became apparent that another manufacturing facility would be needed-closer to the water. The logical site was the then sleepy little coastal town of New Bern. At first, it was only launch and make ready. Actual manufacturing came later.

 "I came to New Bern in 1967," Tommy Henshaw recounts. "There was nothing here at all. The contractors had just started. Leon Smith was a mill room supervisor in High Point and he was transferred here as operations manger and he asked me to come with him. At first, it was just me and him. In late '67 we started getting our first boats. We didn't have a travel lift. We'd just take a bulldozer and dig a trench to the creek and back the boats down on their trailers like small boats and float them off."

 Inevitably, the logic of building all of the yachts under one roof – and closer to the sea – meant moving the entire operation to New Bern in 1997.

 Not all of the new employees were sanguine about the town's latest economic Godsend. Donna Holmes, who has been in the upholstery shop at New Bern for nearly 28 years now, commented recently: " After my first day, I went home and told my husband I probably wouldn't be working there long because they couldn't possibly stay in business building boats that nice. There aren't that many people who can afford them!"

 Back in the spring of 1965, Willis Slane and Hatteras Yachts almost achieved success beyond even his wildest dreams. Slane had added a very sporty 28-foot hull to the lineup and shortly was approached by the United States Navy, which was looking to build patrol boats. The war in Vietnam was heating up and they needed a tough, shallow-draft vessel that could be adapted to the murky rivers of Southeast Asia. Slane took two 28s that had not yet received their engine packages and had them equipped with jet drives. He took one of the boats to Washington for a demonstration.

 Tommy Henshaw tells part of the story: "I was working at Morehead and he brought one down to Spooners Creek and I had a chance to ride on it when he was driving. He tested that boat to the limit. It was fast. It would turn and stop on a dime. It would do whatever. The Navy was impressed and wanted to order 200 of them. The catch was they wanted to put government inspectors in different areas. Willis told them he'd be glad to build them, but he wouldn't have the government tell him how to do it. He'd build to their spec and that was that. So, we lost the whole contract. But, they bought those two Willis had prepared and made a mold off of them and built them in two other locations."

So, many of the patrol boats you saw on the newsreels (or, perhaps, for yourself) were Hatteras 28s in Navy drab. It is impossible to say if that incident hastened Willis Slane's death, but the fact is he died a short time later, on Nov. 7, 1965. He was 44 years old.

 Slane was replaced by another of the initial investors, David R. Parker, Jr., who went on to guide the company through an incredible period of expansion and growth. Slane must have had a good sense of his mortality, because he brought Parker in when he became ill.

 "Of the group that was close there," Parker says, "I was the only one who didn't have a family business and that's how I got involved." Slane, he adds, "... had most everything wrong with him, but he kept everything moving. But, he called me up and said, 'You better get off your butt and come over here and protect your investment."'

 For the next 20 years, Parker was at the helm. Early on, he foresaw that the company needed more capital to meet the increasing demand for its now highly regarded product. He was the architect of its merger into North American Rockwell in 1968. Thirteen new models were born of this merger, but by 1972, North American Rockwell had rethought its corporate stance and decided to get out of the marine market. The company subsequently was sold to AMF.

 In the 70’s and early 80’s, Hatteras Yachts was a magnet for a multiplicity of talented people, including the likes of Chuck Kauth, Phil Fowler (now president of Covington Diesel) Bryant Phillips, Alton Herndon, Don Farlow, John Adams and many more.  

" Back then, we didn't have a service department. If there was a problem out in the field the dealer couldn't fix, they'd send the person responsible for making the mistake. You learn pretty quick not to make mistakes if you have to fix' em yourself. " -Ray Myers

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