Yacht builder Joseph “Joe” Conboy, 87, passed away in North Carolina recently.
From 1966 to 1984, Conboy built wooden and fiberglass boats at his yard on Robinson Creek in Urbanna. He specialized in custom-built yacht construction and repair and built sail and trawler yachts using wood and Airex/fiberglass.
Conboy grew up on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and it was there he obtained his love of the Chesapeake Bay, boats, boatbuilding and Chesapeake Bay retrievers. Throughout most of his working life, there was a bay retriever at his side.
With an engineering background and a flair for building boats, Conboy and his crews built some of the finest custom yachts in the country. Conboy left Linwood and Milford Price’s boatyard in Deltaville in 1966 to open his own boat shop in Urbanna. He employed local craftsmen, but also advertised in national publications. This brought craftsmen and customers from all over the country and reporters from some of the largest yachting publications in the nation.
Lin and Larry Pardey, sailors and writers, known for their numerous books on cruising and sailing, spent time at the yard with Larry working there for a while with Joe. Famous CBS television news anchor Walter Cronkite brought his 36-foot sailboat there several times for repair. Cronkite’s 1968 and 1969 visits to Urbanna were front page news in the Southside Sentinel. The June 19, 1969 issue of the Sentinel featured a photo of Conboy and Cronkite standing together in Cronkite’s boat at the top of the front page.
Walter Cronkite, the famed CBS news commentator, was in Middlesex Saturday to take delivery of his 36-foot sailboat which has been undergoing winter repairs at the yard of Joseph L. Conboy and Associates in Urbanna. Cronkite is pictured with Conboy above.
This photo was taken during a rain shower which occurred as Cronkite was readying his boat for a sail back to New York, his home port. (This image was photographed from a bound volume in the Sentinel archives.)
The list of well-known local craftsmen and others who worked for Conboy is extensive. Locally, boatbuilder the late Herman Weston of Deltaville; and craftsmen Rudy Shackelford, the late Wesley Neal, the late Roy Ware, all of Urbanna, and the late Delores Wright, who was secretary/bookkeeper at the yard, all worked there.
Some of those who left Conboy to continue in the business were Steve Zimmerman of today’s Zimmerman Marine in Deltaville, David Judson of Mathews County and builder of classic wooden boats, David King, a Harvard University graduate and known today as Port Townsend, Washington state’s “boatbuilding mayor” was at the yard in the mid-1970s; the late Paul Sherwood who operated Sherwood Boat Building Co. in Wake for many years; and the late Joe Jackimovicz, who had a master’s degree in Geology and went on to build and repair boats at Boothbay Harbour Shipyard in Maine for 30 years.
John England, manager of the Deltaville Maritime Museum boat shop, who worked for Conboy in the early 1970s, said that “if you own a Conboy yacht you own something very special.”
“Joe had tremendous knowledge when it came to building wooden boats,” said England, originally from Massachusetts. “I, along with others from the hippie generation, went there to learn how to build boats and Joe was a good teacher.”
Shackelford, who worked for Conboy as a boat refinisher, said that Conboy was a great salesman and his success came from having good people working for him.
Conboy operated Joseph Conboy LTD in Urbanna from 1966 to 1984. After that he ran Conboy Marine Service Inc. at Kent Narrows in Grasonville, Md. before moving to North Carolina where he also built boats.
