The Pacific war was fought across thousands of miles of ocean, far from any established shipyard. Damaged warships needed repair where they fought, not back in San Francisco or Puget Sound. Everett-Pacific's answer was the Advance Base Sectional Dock - massive floating dry docks built in modular sections, each 93 feet long with a 165-foot beam and 10,000 tons of lifting capacity. Bolt enough sections together and you could hoist a battleship out of the water. The USS Artisan, designated ABSD-1, comprised ten such sections stretching 927 feet when fully assembled, with a combined lift of 100,000 tons. These docks were self-sustaining cities: each section carried diesel generators, steam-powered pumps rated at 15,000 gallons per minute, and fuel storage for the ships under repair. Crews of 600 to 1,000 men lived aboard barracks ships moored alongside. Once completed, the docks were towed thousands of miles to remote naval bases like Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, where they kept the fleet fighting.

Not everything Everett-Pacific built was enormous. The yard produced ten net-laying ships - 1,100-ton, 194-foot vessels whose primary job was stringing steel anti-torpedo and anti-submarine nets around harbors and anchored ships. It was unglamorous, essential work. As the war ground on, these net layers found themselves pressed into salvage operations, troop transport, buoy maintenance, and tugboat duty - the kind of improvised versatility that characterized the Pacific campaign. The yard also turned out dozens of 66-foot harbor tugs, the YTL class, each crewed by just four men and powered by a single diesel engine. These tiny workhorses scattered across the globe after the war. Some went to the Philippines, others to Taiwan, Argentina, Paraguay, Cambodia, and France. A few were sold to private owners who renamed them and put them to work in civilian harbors. One ended up as a diving platform at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

The Pigott brothers came to shipbuilding sideways. Their family company, Pacific Car and Foundry, was a major manufacturer of railcars and trucks with plants in Renton, Seattle, and Tacoma already building barges for the Navy. William Pigott Jr., born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1895, saw wartime shipbuilding as both patriotic duty and business opportunity. He and Paul established Everett-Pacific as part of the Emergency Shipbuilding Program, with the Navy providing capital to get the yard running. In 1945, Pacific Car and Foundry absorbed the shipyard. But the Everett waterfront lease expired in 1949, and the yard went quiet. William died in San Francisco in 1947, just two years after the war ended. Pacific Car and Foundry continued to grow, eventually renaming itself PACCAR Inc. in 1972 - today one of the world's largest manufacturers of heavy trucks, with the Kenworth and Peterbilt brands in its stable.

After Everett-Pacific closed, the waterfront site passed through other hands. Western Gear, a heavy machinery manufacturer, operated there for years. But the land's naval destiny was not finished. Beginning in 1987, the old shipyard was rebuilt over five years to become Naval Station Everett, which was commissioned in 1994 as the Navy's most modern homeport on the West Coast. The transformation was fitting: a site that had built the floating infrastructure of World War II now hosted the surface combatants of the post-Cold War fleet. Today, destroyers and frigates tie up where net layers and tugboats once slid down the ways. The yard's physical traces are gone, absorbed into the naval station's piers and buildings, but its legacy floats on - some of the medium auxiliary dry docks Everett-Pacific produced remained in service into the late 1990s, more than half a century after they were built on the shores of Port Gardner Bay.