Andrew Hippert, Moss Landing Boat Works

Business Owner, Fisherman

Andrew Hippert, manager of Moss Landing Boat Works, walks the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust around the yard and discusses projects underway and large investments in local infrastructure in the pipeline.

No working waterfront is complete without a shipyard that can support its local fleet. With that in mind, Moss Landing Boat Works’ Andrew Hippert has a plan to make sure every boat that ties up in the harbor can get hauled out for minor repair and major overhauls without making a day’s boat ride north or south.

A 300-ton travel lift is expected to come online at the shipyard in 2020 so large squid boats that call Moss Landing home won’t have to travel to the San Francisco Bay Area or Southern California to get hauled out of the water.

Almost as important is addressing Moss Landing’s dearth of pizza. Hippert has purchased a brick pizza oven and plans to open a pizza restaurant at Woodward Marine, aka the fuel dock, in the coming year.

There’s lots of activity on the sprawling lot on the northern tip of Sandholdt Road where the Moss Land Boat Works is located, even before the coming additions are considered. There’s a boat building facility where a resin-infused 35-foot catamaran-style charter boat and a 28-foot sport boat are under construction. Peninsula Diesel and Custom Marine Covers and Woodward Marine are all located on the property.

“We do a little of everything,” Hippert says, pointing to a commercial fishing boat on blocks that has been lengthened, given a bulbous bow that will soon be sandblasted and painted.

Moss Landing Boat Works opened for business in 2015 with Hippert as manager after Gravelles' Boatyard closed. He came down from Santa Cruz where he previously managed Aquarius Boat Works. He’s also a boat owner who commercially fishes groundfish hook and line on the Monterey Bay.

Hippert got his start in the maritime business in an unlikely place—behind the fish counter at a Whole Foods in Missouri. But he followed his passion for the ocean west where he managed seafood counters at Northern California Whole Foods locations before working on the waterfront.

“We have a lot of potential here,” he says. “I don’t just only want to be a great shipyard, but a great partner to the success of commercial fisheries here.”