american custom yachts 90

About American Custom Yacht

American custom yachts.

American Custom Yacht has built its reputation on long-lasting relationships with its owners. An expert in the custom sportfisherman. American Custom Yachts is more than simply a boatyard. American Custom Marine constructs their American-made vessels at their 63-acre marine facility in Stuart, Florida . The facility also provides a full range of marine services so rest assured they know what they’re doing when constructing their own sportfish yachts.

Call 954.462.5557 today to speak to an ACY Specialist and to receive information about all the American Custom Yachts for sale in today’s market.

Available Used American Custom Yachts for Sale

Search american custom yacht by price, search american custom yacht by length, search american custom yacht by year.

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Willis Custom Yachts' plans will reignite Stuart's boatbuilding heritage, create jobs

Stuart's legacy of boatbuilding dates back 100 years. It was 1921 when Curt Whiticar built his first boat, launching Whiticar Boat Works and what would become a mecca for the construction of some of the world's finest high-performance sport fishing yachts.

Since then, Stuart has become synonymous with world-class sportfishing thanks to brands such as Monterey, Billy Knowles, Gamefisherman, Garlington-Landeweer, Jim Smith, L & H, Tribute and American Custom Yachts.

The latter, in the Treasure Coast Commerce Center in west Stuart, was acquired by  Willis Custom Yachts  earlier this year, but terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Boatbuilding: Flipping the 8 ton hull upside down is an important milestone

Moving day: How a 100-foot sportfishing boat goes from land to sea

Stringers Tavern & Oyster Bar: Great food blends with Stuart's boatbuilding history

Willis Custom Yachts is a new entity formed from Willis Marine Inc. , a boatbuilding company founded by Mark Willis of Stuart in 1990. American Custom Yachts was founded in Stuart in 1991 by Dominick LaCombe.

The new company plans to add 75 jobs soon, and more in the years to come once it starts to build the center console brand Venture Boats in a new manufacturing facility. The company plans to build that in two or three years on the vacant land across the South Fork of the St. Lucie River from the company's main yard.

But first, the boat must be redesigned to compensate for added outboard motors, said Doug West, president and general manager of Willis' yacht services.

Willis Custom Yachts

The sale of the waterfront property along the South Fork of the St. Lucie River and Okeechobee Waterway, and in between the bridges for Interstate 95 and Florida's Turnpike, gives Willis Custom Yachts:

• 64 acres on both sides of the waterway
• 34 acres of working boatyard
• About 300 feet of frontage along the waterway
• 25 wet slips with 8 feet of depth
• 2 haul-out wells

The new company announced plans to add:

• 220-ton marine lift
• 150-ton marine lift (new)
• 90,000-square-foot yacht-construction building
• On-site restaurant
• New construction facility for Venture Boats, a center console brand now owned by Willis Custom Yachts.

Willis Custom Yachts also will build a new waterfront facility east of Northwest Flagler Avenue near the Roosevelt Bridge in Stuart to facilitate new yacht-customer deliveries.

“I am very excited to have waterfront access of this magnitude," Willis said. "It changes the game for us and will vastly enhance our ability to provide the highest quality service and support to all of our customers.”

Willis Marine sportfishing boats

Over the last 30 years, Willis has developed a reputation as being a builder of one of the finest sportfishing yachts on the ocean. His partner, Brooks Smith, founder and CEO of InComm Payments , a global financial technology company, is an avid angler and longtime Willis customer.

Willis, originally from North Carolina, began his career in the fishing and boating industry early in life, obtaining his captain's license at age 19. He got an engineering degree from Western Pennsylvania University. After graduating, Willis pursued his passion for fishing in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where he built his first boat.

Willis Marine has built and launched 15 boats since being founded, including well-known boats on the sailfish and marlin tournament circuits such as Katie M, Lucky Punch, NuCo2, Uno Mas and the second Bone Shaker, which originally had been the Katie M.

Custom sportfishing boats of 60-90 feet in length cost owners millions of dollars and often take 2-3 years to build one boat. A 63-foot boat built by Willis in 2001 is currently offered by a broker for $2.9 million. 

What changes are coming?

The next Willis boats — 61-90 feet and designed to perform in fishing scenarios in seas around the world — will be rolling off the production line at a faster rate in coming years, West said.

"Smith is big into technology and innovation. We are going to introduce in the new boatbuilding facility a lot of machinery so we can reduce the build time significantly. That will allow us to build six boats at a time instead of one," West told TCPalm.

West joined Willis from Lauderdale Marine Center, where he worked in the yacht service industry since 2015. Before that, he worked for the family of Wayne Huizenga with Blockbuster and AutoNation. In 2005, Wayne Huizenga Jr. bought Rybovich , a boatbuilding and yacht repair and service facility in Riviera Beach. The next year, Huizenga Jr. called West about coming to Rybovich to get operations in shape.

West said Willis' main focus will be to complete the project begun in 2020 by American Custom Yachts, hull No. 22, a 68-footer named Cambeaux, and to finish hulls No. 15 and 16, two 70-footers. West said three new orders already have been placed.

Ed Killer is TCPalm's outdoors writer. Sign up for his and other weekly newsletters at profile.tcpalm.com/newsletters/manage . Friend Ed on Facebook at Ed Killer , follow him on Twitter @tcpalmekiller or email him at [email protected] .

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C'est La Vie

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C'EST LA VIE yacht NOT for charter*

27.4m  /  89'11 | american custom yachts | 2012.

Cabin Configuration

• Previous Yacht

The 27.4m/89'11" motor yacht 'C'est La Vie' was built by American Custom Yachts . This luxury vessel's exterior design is the work of American Custom Yachts.

Range & Performance

Powered by twin diesel MTU (16V4000 M93L) 4,613hp engines, she comfortably cruises at 40 knots, reaches a maximum speed of 48 knots. Her water tanks store around 1,714 Litres of fresh water.

*Charter C'est La Vie Motor Yacht

Motor yacht C'est La Vie is currently not believed to be available for private Charter. To view similar yachts for charter , or contact your Yacht Charter Broker for information about renting a luxury charter yacht.

C'est La Vie Yacht Owner, Captain or marketing company

'Yacht Charter Fleet' is a free information service, if your yacht is available for charter please contact us with details and photos and we will update our records.

C'est La Vie Photos

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Specification

M/Y C'est La Vie

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American Custom Yachts – Built on Tradition

Business View Magazine interviews Dominick LaCombe Jr., General Manager of American Custom Yachts as part of our focus on the maritime industry.

American Custom Yachts’ name reveals just a portion of what this Stuart, Florida-based company has to offer: repairs, repowering, and refurbishing yachts, complete painting services, and vessel storage are an important part of its business model. But it is ACY’s custom-built, high-performance vessels and their exceptional quality that truly established its name on the world stage.

American Custom Yachts was founded in 1991 by Dominick LaCombe, Sr., who had acquired a solid reputation in the industry by age 29, when he was running Monterey Boats, a leading manufacturer of sport-fishing yachts. At ACY’s inception, his résumé already included supervising construction of the fastest diesel powered, sport-fishing boat in the world, which reached speeds of 48 knots.

LaCombe partnered with a Louisiana-based family to start his new venture, which began by building a 58-foot demonstration yacht that took a year to build. “It literally went around the world and was shown off,” says ACY’s General Manager, Dominick LaCombe, Jr. “That was our marketing strategy, to demo the boat and show the world what we could do.”

Next, the partners asked him to build a slightly larger yacht, on spec. After the craft was built – another year’s work – it was also taken on tour. “The business started to pick up because people were seeing our style of boat,” says LaCombe. “It was a real fast, real lightweight boat that could take on almost any sea conditions.”

Custom-boat builders were commonplace at that time, with the city of Stuart being well-known in the industry. But most of the companies were not known for producing vessels that were exceptionally fast, a feature that is a calling card of ACY’s meticulously hand-crafted sport-fishing boats.

“Between ‘90 and ‘99, most boats were in the 30-knot range and they were made out of fiberglass,” says LaCombe. “We were among the first pioneers of more efficient hull designs which allowed us to gain speed and keep the weight down at the same time.”

The company’s vessels are crafted using traditional, cold-molded, wooden boat-building techniques, but feature ultra-light materials, such as Kevlar, which are used in the aerospace industry. For strength, laminated wood is used for the keel, stringers, and deck beams; fiberglass and Kevlar-laminated plywood are utilized for hulls and structural bulkheads. The Kevlar, a polymer stronger than fiberglass, is the secret to each craft’s light weight and high speed.

“The niche that we had was a quality built boat from start to finish,” LaCombe explains. “The idea behind our boats is to take, from the tiniest piece of wood on the keel, all the way up to anything on the boat, and build it from scratch and to fabricate it right here in our facility.”

As more orders were received, ACY found that it had outgrown its facilities, so the company shifted operations to a new location on the Okeechobee Waterway, with easy access to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. The move also facilitated an update to the company’s business model to include repairs, repowering, and refitting, complete painting services, and storage for more than 300 vessels.

“ The idea there was it’s nice to build the boats and it’s great to love our name and our reputation, but being on the water allowed us to service the fleet,” LaCombe offers. “The nature of the business went that way because boats require a lot of service and maintenance, especially a wooden boat. The idea was to service our fleet and then to service other boats and it didn’t matter if the boats were made of fiberglass, wood, or metal. We have the ability here to fix and repair or upgrade any style of boat or any type of material a boat is built out of.”

ACY’s 63-acre campus also includes two subsidiaries, Bausch-American Towers, which builds aluminum sport-fish towers, custom-molded lightweight hard tops, and accessories; and Venture by American, which builds handcrafted, luxury, center-console boats.

From its humble beginnings, the company has grown to 95 employees, and over time, service and repair has replaced yacht building as the dominant portion of ACY’s overall business. “Up to 2005, we used to be about 65-70 percent production. Recently, we’ve probably reduced production to around 30 percent and service up to 70-80 percent,” LaCombe avers.

But broadening the business’ scope to include service and repairs has proven to be a game changer for ACY. “There was actually more competition, from a boat-building perspective, in our local area in the early nineties to the 2000s, but a lot of them didn’t have the ability to shift into that service model,” LaCombe speculates. “Unfortunately, a lot of the big names that I grew up looking up to are gone.”

In addition to adapting its business model, LaCombe believes that ACY has sustained itself through brand recognition and its longevity in the industry. But it still has to promote itself which is why it recently created an in-house, business development office. Another key move for the company came in 2014, when LaCombe’s partners purchased North America’s largest yacht manufacturer, Westport Yachts, based in Port Angeles, Washington.

“We’re looking at combined efforts in marketing because we’re able to service that type of fleet,” says LaCombe. “That purchase really works towards reducing some of the costs amongst both companies. One of the big things with the Westport purchase is we want to be known as a group that can build your entire fleet, from 160 feet down to 34 feet. There aren’t many companies in the United States that can pull that off anymore.”

AT A GLANCE

WHO: American Custom Yachts WHAT: Full-service boatyard and custom boat builder WHERE: Stuart, Florida WEBSITE:  www.americancustomyachts.com

PREFERRED VENDORS

Florida Marine Tech Inc. – www.floridamarinetech.com

Port Supply –  www.westmarine.com

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© 2024 Southern Boating Media

American Custom Yachts

Member since: 01.30.18

Dominick LaCombe Jr.

6800 SW Jack James Drive

Stuart, Florida, 34997

United States

Region: Southeast

Phone: 772-221-9100

Mobile: 772-215-9536

Fax: 772-288-4993

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.americancustomyachts.com

Jennifer LaCombe

Mobile: 772-486-7089

[email protected]

Wayne Lukey

Mobile: 772-260-8428

[email protected]

John Resnik

Mobile: 772-215-9156

[email protected]

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Meet Dominick LaCombe Sr.

• By Chris Rabil
• Updated: November 19, 2020

For nearly 30 years, the unofficial sign of your arrival in South Florida has been the huge American flag proudly flying over American Custom Yachts, a sprawling 70-plus-acre ­full-service facility built on the St. Lucie River, splitting I-95 and Florida’s Turnpike in Stuart. A Vineland, New Jersey, native turned Florida transplant, Dominick LaCombe Sr. is ACY’s ­president. LaCombe spent his summers with his maternal grandfather fishing out of Cape May and ­hunting in the winters. He began visiting Florida in 1972 while running a 45-foot Hatteras that was based out of Stuart, and finally made a permanent move south at the age of 28. LaCombe’s strong work ethic and creativity—born from a lifetime of working with his hands—has ­propelled ACY to the upper echelon of the world’s finest custom-boat builders.

Q: You were one of the first to use Kevlar in boatbuilding—where did that idea come from?

A: We were looking for a way to make the bottoms of the boats stronger. We worked with DuPont and other experts on how to use Kevlar in the build process. It involved cutting with diamond-dust scissors and vacuum-bagging it once it was laid. Glass Machine was the first boat we used Kevlar on. We learned a lot from that experience.

Q: When did you start building boats?

A: The first one started in 1984 at Monterey when we built Glass Machine , which I ran for the next year. Then I returned to Monterey and ran the company. After six years at Monterey, American Custom Yachts was born in June 1992, and ACY ­eventually bought Monterey.

Read Next: Double Take is Hull No. 19 from ACY, and she’s a beauty .

Q: How many have you built?

A: I built 17 boats during my time at Monterey, and we’re currently building Hull No. 22 at American Custom Yachts. The American builds have ranged in size from a 42-foot walkaround to our largest, the 90-foot C’est La Vie .

Q: What do you feel sets you apart from other custom builders?

A: We’ve built two of the world’s most powerful sport-fish boats: C’est La Vie and Patriot . Patriot , originally built as Renegade in 1989, had 6,290 horsepower and ran at a top speed of 48 knots. C’est La Vie is 90 feet long with 9,200 horsepower. We were one of the first to be able to build such a large boat with so much power. Right now we are working on a 68-foot ­hardtop express for a customer who enjoys bottomfishing and swordfishing. This boat is going to have three ­steering stations, including one in the aft portion of the salon that will allow the captain to overlook the cockpit. Some other features include 80 cubic feet of combined cockpit ­refrigerated storage and ­fish-box space, plus a ­78-gallon built-in transom livewell. It’s going to be a really innovative setup.

Q: If you were building a boat for yourself, what would it be?

A: Something in the 60- to 70-foot range. I would want it to be light, with high ­horsepower. To be honest, I would want it to be plain and simple. We haven’t built a plain and simple boat in a long time, but if it were for me to run, that is exactly what I would want. Something fast and easy to maintain.

Q: Where would the first stop be?

A: I wish I could take it to Venezuela, but since we can’t do that anymore, it would be St. Thomas or Cape May [New Jersey]; I don’t blue marlin fish much anymore, but I still enjoy fishing for white marlin and sailfish. I always will be a marlin fisherman at heart—well, any billfish. I love it all.

Q: What’s your favorite boat you’ve built so far?

A: Ask anyone else and they’ll probably tell you it would be Glass Machine because it was the first one and the fastest one. Honestly, I enjoy the real high-horsepower boats. C’est La Vie is probably my favorite build to date so far because we were one of the first to build such a large boat with so much power. No one else was doing it at the time, and it was much harder to do. We’re proud of what we did with that one.

Read Next: Check out our review of the American Custom Yachts, Mon Chari .

Q: Any impact from the COVID-19 pandemic?

A: I have been shocked with what has gone on—I really thought our business would slow down, but if you think about it, boating is a great way to socially distance, and I believe it has stayed a priority because it’s a way for people to spend time with their families. We’re also seeing boats that would normally travel this time of year ­coming to the yard for bigger ­projects they may have put off ­otherwise. What I thought was going happen is the opposite of what’s going on in our business. We’ve been very fortunate in that respect.

Q: What notable trends in upgrades are you seeing right now?

A: The two biggest items are Seakeepers and the Furuno omnidirectional sonars. Some of our customers have won big money in ­tournaments right after we installed their sonars. Compared with anything else, I think those are the two biggest items. We have also seen a lot of people bring their boats in to update them. We have been adding a lot of mezzanines to older boats, and upgrading interior and exterior lighting to LED. I think with the cheaper interest rates, it has given customers the opportunity to purchase an older boat and have some extra money to fix it up.

Q: Have you seen the larger center-consoles eat into the smaller sport-fish market?

A: We haven’t built a smaller sport-fish boat in some time—most of our boats are 65-plus feet. I have seen some owners go back and forth between ­bigger ­center-consoles and ­traditional inboard boats though. Owners go in cycles: They get tired of a full ­program with a captain and crew, so they decide to ­simplify with a smaller boat; they don’t have an engine room to clean or need a ­full-time captain, but after a while, they miss the comfort of the salon and air ­conditioning, so they cycle back again to a big boat.

Q: If you weren’t at ACY, what would you be doing?

A: I’m a simple guy. Living the dream to me is being in a place where if the wind is blowing, I’m hunting, and if it’s not, I’m fishing.

Q: What’s it like working in a family business?

A: It’s very enjoyable. I work with my son, Dominick Jr., who is now the ­general manager of ACY; he’s also managing the 68-foot hardtop express build. My daughter, Darra, is our CFO, and my daughter-in-law, Jennifer, heads our ­marketing department. I get to work between 7 and 8 a.m., where I oversee the whole ­operation and look for areas where we can improve. I inspect the paint jobs for quality and review our repair work as well. I’m the kind of guy who always has to be doing something, and I love building boats. Anything I can do with my hands makes me happy. There is nothing better than waking up in the morning and getting to do what you love.

• More: American Custom Yachts , Before the Strike , Boats , Players

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American Custom Yachts

Posted by on Wednesday, October 19th, 2016 at 1:29pm.

Photo By: @AmericanCustomYachts

American Custom Yachts was started by Dominick LaCombe in 1991 and is based out of Stuart, FL. By the time he founded ACY, Dominick was already well-established in the marine industry as he had supervised the construction of the world’s fastest diesel powered sportfisherman that reached speeds of 48 knots.

American Custom Yachts maintains a 63-acre marine facility that accommodates the manufacturing of their world-famous custom sportfisherman along with providing an array of marine services such as yacht repair, repowering and refitting, full painting services, and storage for over 300 boats with around the clock security.

In 1993, ACY launched its first custom sportfisherman that featured an exclusive water slicing hull design known as the Freedom 58. Since then, ACY has been focused on research and development as they strive to set the standard for strength, speed, and comfort. Every vessel is gracefully handcrafted to meet each owner’s specific needs.

In 2014, American Custom Yachts acquired the Venture name and company assets to bring them under one roof. ACY has re-emerged the Venture brand as a proven and highly sought after fishing machine by introducing a variety of innovative improvements and upgrades giving owners custom options to perfectly fit their needs. Today, the Venture line has been tactfully redesigned for comfort, performance, convenience, and improved fishability. 

American Custom Yachts is also proud to welcome Westport as a new affiliate and member of the Edison Chouest Offshore family of companies. Westport has been around for over 50 years and is one of North America's largest luxury Yacht Builders with four locations, three in Washington State and one in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

American Custom Yachts takes pride in their reputation of building long lasting relationships with customers and business associates. For whatever a boat owner’s needs may be, ACY will make them feel right at home. At American Custom Yachts, the proven results speak for themselves.

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