George Pensel grew up on the east bank of Lake George in upstate New York, where his father ran a marina. A boyhood of picnic baskets and trips out to the islands and hanging around the family business involved water-skiing most of all. Young George just loved to ski and to drive boats. Frustrated at the State of New York's insistence that no one younger than ten might hold a boating license, he t
ook, at the age of eight, a flat-bottomed boat with a three-horse Evinrude on a cruise of ever-smaller concentric circles. He swam in Lake George on his birthday, May 30th, and he froze his little keester off. He paddled a dinghy to see his friends. He slalomed more than he walked in the summertime. He worked around the marina until the age of fifteen when, one morning, his dad announced plans for something else, his father's joy in lakeside retail, lakeside service gone now. "I grew up a bunch that day," George says, all he ever wanted disappearing before his eyes, that tow boat motoring back into a retreating sky. "But I loved my dad, and I honored his wishes without protest." Nervous and then some, he approached the buyers of his family's erstwhile marina, and he asked for a summer job that turned into a long-term deal, through the warm months of 1970-1976. Meanwhile, George went to music school, a Gibson guitar and big hair and bigger dreams. "I discovered that I probably wasn't going to be a rock star," George says now, and he became practical, enrolled in courses in hotel-and-restaurant management and in business administration, throwing in some accounting classes. Then the phone rang. The man who had hired a teenaged George six years before on the line, wondering if George would like to be a partner of sorts in a new boat company. The world changed that day, and George went to work on the bottom half of wooden boats, saws and sandpaper, some bottom paint and some oils. Soon enough, George was doing it all, topsides of course, but also originating a ship's store, the detailing on the new boats, writing the work orders and the invoicing. By 1981, it became obvious that the company's owner had not been watching his margins and, at 26 years of age, George now an assistant manager --could see trouble coming. Time, he thought, to maybe set out on his own. So he sat down with an accountant, considered sources of capital, worked out a budget and, advised to specialize, he decided on the canvas business with not much beyond muscle, enthusiasm, and an antique Singer sewing machine. "That old machine took me through $75,000 worth of boat-covers." Then the phone rang again. A major boat manufacturer wanting George to sell its boats, the company told him to find a retail location, "to sell some boats to your friends," to look for discounts on his inventory identical to the company's oldest and largest dealerships', to attend some boat shows and sell some boats off the last boats sold. In 1981, he went to the IMTEC (International Marine Trades and Conference) show in Chicago and, besides the line he was representing, he saw some Cobalts. He thought them copycats. Copycats but with quality like George had never seen. He went home and became his boatbuilder's ninth-largest dealer. In 1982, he was "scooped into the Cobalt booth" at IMTEC, and George commenced to inspecting. "I looked at the wiring looms. I looked into the storage spaces and found them finished. I looked at the gelcoat. I looked under the seats." Their scooping aside, George found the Cobalt people "friendly and impressive," their boats anything but copies. He said to the Cobalt folks, "I love your boats, but I'm committed to my current manufacturer. I simply don't have the resources to take on another boat line." By May of that year he had sold all of the boats allowed him by the builder, and he called Neodesha, Kansas, asking "Could you send me some boats?" Asking "Could they be in New York by the Fourth of July?' The boats arrived with buyers waiting. "I sold two 22-footers that day. The people on Lake George weren't looking for the lowest price. They wanted the highest quality. They still do." Invited to Cobalt's dealer meeting in August, held that year in Las Vegas, George remembers a tall, wiry guy Fred Holmes, the eastern regional sales manager asking "Are you George Pensel?" And then Fred proceeds "to pick me up, to lift me off the ground, and I knew I had joined the right boatbuilders at last." Now thirty years into doing business on a handshake, deals done among honorable women and men, George speaks of conversations, long conversations with Pack St. Clair, about ways to make things better. "Pack always wanted to fix the problem," George says, "always looking not to what was but to what might be. Together, we've always tried to the right thing." And, best news of all, George Pensel is back in the marina business. He has built again a facility such as his father's "except mine is bigger and better," says a laughing and still dutiful son that had given him such windblown fun and freedom as a little boy, Boats by George on the Lake at 291 Cleverdale Road in Cleverdale, New York. And back at 18 State Route 149 in Lake George, New York the company's showroom stands on the exact location of the little stucco building with the 22-foot frontage, bought on a deferred down payment, where it all began three decades ago. And still with George and Patty Pensel, still doing it all, is Mr. Rodney Porter, Boats by George's first employee and now the service manager. "He's an amazing guy," George says of his old friend. "Together, he and I can pull rabbits out of a hat." With 37 employees in the summer months, and ten key employees who have been with the company for years, Boats by George remains what it has always been, people just like you, who find life's greatest joys in, on, and around some big water. Boats by George is conveniently located near the areas of Albany, Burlington, Queensbury, New York, Saratoga Springs.
