Joe Dyer was fourteen when his father died, leaving him the son of a sawmill manager in a town that lived on the Columbia River. He could have gone anywhere. Instead, he wandered into Tim Driscoll's boat shop on the lower Columbia and fell in love with the craft of shaping wood into something that floats. Driscoll was an unusual teacher - his father was an English seaman, his father-in-law a Clatsop Indian canoe builder - and the skills he passed to Joe carried the DNA of two boatbuilding traditions. By 1929, Dyer had founded Astoria Marine Construction on the banks of the Lewis and Clark River, a shipyard that would build everything from fishing boats to Navy minesweepers over the next eight decades. When the yard finally closed in 2013, its records went to the Columbia River Maritime Museum - a museum Dyer himself had helped create.
Dyer's first large project announced his ambitions. In 1931, Captain Fritz Elfving hired him to design and build the Tourist III, a car ferry for the Astoria-North Beach route. Dyer leased a shipway at the Port of Astoria, hired a crew, and built the 120-foot, 233-ton vessel in just ninety days. The Tourist III carried 28 automobiles and 280 passengers, and it was so well constructed that it put its rival, Columbia Transportation, out of business within two years. Ferry service on the Tourist III began on the Fourth of July, 1931, and continued for thirty-five years until the Astoria-Megler Bridge made the crossing obsolete in 1966. The ferry's afterlife was stranger than its service: it was shipped to Kodiak, Alaska, where it became a floating crab-processing plant. A vessel born on the Columbia ended its days in the cold waters of the Gulf of Alaska.
Through the 1930s, Dyer built boats that mixed necessity with elegance. Naval architect John Omundsen joined the firm in 1935, and together they produced pleasure craft for Portland's professional class: a 36-foot express cruiser called Joanne, a luxurious 50-footer named Phantom fitted with twin V-8 engines, a 47-foot boat called Evening Star, and a 52-foot gaff-rigged schooner named Pagan. In 1938, the yard won a federal contract to build the E. Lester Jones, an 88-foot survey ship for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, constructed from pressure-treated wood sourced from a plant in Wauna, Oregon. The contract proved that a small shipyard on a slough in Astoria could meet government standards - a credential that would pay off when larger wars demanded larger ships.
The Korean War brought the yard's most technically demanding work. The Navy needed minesweepers built with minimal iron - non-magnetic hulls that wouldn't trigger the sophisticated naval mines deployed in Korean waters. Astoria Marine Construction won the contract to build Agile-class minesweepers, starting with the USS Dash and the USS Detector, both equipped with aluminum engines. The yard then received an order for three Onversaagd-class minesweepers for the Royal Netherlands Navy. Building warships for a foreign ally from a small-town Oregon shipyard was remarkable enough; building them to specifications that demanded rethinking how a ship's hull interacts with the sea's magnetic field was something else entirely. The yard also de-mothballed reserve fleet vessels, restoring ships to fighting condition.
Between the wars and the ferries, Dyer created something that outlasted all of them. The Columbia River One Design - a 28-foot sloop with a beam of nearly nine feet, a displacement of 7,000 pounds, and a hull speed of 6.56 knots - became a classic of Pacific Northwest sailing. Astoria Shipbuilding built twelve CRODs in total. The second hull, Jean II, won first in class in a Pacific International Yachting Association race. After World War II, Dyer built three more, including one he named Tom Tom after his son Thomas. That boat was passed down through the family. Hulls 1 and 2 were donated to the Columbia River Maritime Museum, where they remain as evidence that a shipyard known for workhorse ferries and military contracts could also produce vessels of genuine grace.
Dyer retired in 1964 at age sixty-six and turned the shipyard over to his employees. In 1968, he sold it to those who wanted to buy in. He built one final boat - the Mary Carol, a motor yacht for advertising executive Ed Ross - at the request of a friend. Joe Dyer died in 1974 at seventy-six, having also served in the Oregon legislature, chaired the local United Way, won Astoria's First Citizen Award, and served as the first chairman of the Oregon State Marine Board. Don Fastabend, who had started at the yard in 1950, was the last employee-owner. He ran it as a boat repair shop until his death in October 2013, and the yard closed with him. The shipyard site is now on the List of Oregon's Most Endangered Places - a recognition that what Dyer built on the banks of the Lewis and Clark River matters enough to fight for.
Located at 46.145N, 123.863W in the Jeffers Gardens area of Astoria, Oregon, on the east bank of the Lewis and Clark River at Jeffers Slough. The shipyard site is south of downtown Astoria along the river. From altitude, the Lewis and Clark River is visible winding toward the Columbia, with the shipyard site at its lower reaches. The Astoria-Megler Bridge dominates the view to the north where the Columbia meets the Pacific. Nearest airport: Astoria Regional Airport (KAST), approximately 4 miles east. Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet. The site is on the National Register of Historic Places and the List of Oregon's Most Endangered Places.