Bollinger Shipyards

Bollinger Shipyards began in 1946 when Donald G. Bollinger, a machinist, put a small inheritance into a repair shop on Bayou Lafourche at Lockport, Louisiana. Eighty years later the family still owns it and it has become the largest privately held shipbuilder in the United States, running yards across south Louisiana and Mississippi with direct access to the Gulf. The company counts more than 189 vessels delivered to the US Coast Guard alone. It employs several thousand people, many of them third and fourth generation shipyard workers.

Government new construction dominates the order book. The Sentinel-class Fast Response Cutter is the long-running programme, a 154-foot patrol cutter the Coast Guard has kept buying, and a September 2025 contract option worth about 507 million dollars added ten more hulls, taking the class from 67 to 77 and stretching production roughly three years. The acquisition of VT Halter Marine and ST Engineering Halter Marine Offshore in 2022, which became Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding and Bollinger Mississippi Repair, brought in the Polar Security Cutter. That heavy icebreaker is the Coast Guard's first new one in decades and it has been troubled, but a March 2025 contract modification worth about 951 million dollars advanced detail design and construction, and later legislation funded the second and third ships. Navy work includes the Navajo-class towing, salvage and rescue ships, the Auxiliary Personnel Lighter berthing barges, an oceanographic survey ship, and the Mine Countermeasures Unmanned Surface Vessel.

Commercial construction has been part of the business since the beginning. Bollinger builds offshore supply vessels, tugs, barges, liftboats and specialty craft for operators working the Gulf energy fields and inland waterways, a market that swings hard with oil prices and keeps the yards busy between government contracts.

Repair and conversion is the third leg and traces back to what the founder actually started. The company runs drydocks and topside repair berths for commercial and government customers, handling everything from routine survey work to major conversions. Supporting shops give it capability most yards contract out. Bollinger manufactures and repairs propellers, runs its own machine shop and hydraulic services, and keeps in-house naval architecture and marine engineering staff who work on both new designs and modifications to existing ones. The yards hold ISO 9001 certification. Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten, the founder used to say, and the company still quotes him. Private ownership shapes how the place runs. There are no quarterly earnings calls driving decisions about which yards get capital, and the family has held on through four generations of oil price collapses, hurricanes and swings in federal shipbuilding budgets. The order book mixes federal programmes of record with commercial work that turns over far faster, and the yards are laid out to move between the two without leaving a berth idle.