Another Milestone for Green Cove's Naval Architect
Boris Kirilloff Oversees Ferry Conversion to Serve Famed Islands
Boris Kirilloff has been working under the radar from offices in Green Cove Springs for nearly 30 years. Kirilloff is a naval architect, and he’s signed a lot of NDAs promising not to disclose information about his rich and often famous yacht clients.
A naval architect is an engineer who specializes in designing boats of all sizes. At their best, NAs use physics, materials science and an eye for proportion to create watercraft that are works of art. There aren’t a lot of them—only about 10,000 in the entire U.S., compared to more than 120,000 regular architects.
As always, Kirilloff is working a couple deals right now that he is forbidden from talking about, but the 72-year-old Fleming Islander can discuss his recent work for the very public Massachusetts Steamship Authority. The state-owned entity operates a fleet of ferries that serve the Bay State’s two big islands—Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.
Kirilloff likes to say that he “eats, drinks and breathes yachts.” The only downside to the business are yacht owners, the always wealthy and often demanding individuals who are his clientele. That’s why he so appreciates working with the professional staff of the Steamship Authority.
“They are the golden client,” he said. “They don’t haggle, and you don’t have to worry about them going out of business.”
Kirilloff was recently honored with a “plank” from the ship Aquinnah. The term “plank owner” was derived from the days of wooden ships when a commissioning crew each took a plank from the deck of a vessel when she was later decommissioned. In Kiriloff’s case, the plank is square hunk of Aquinnah’s steel with his name on it.
The plank was cut from a 24-foot section that was itself cut from what had been an offshore supply ship serving the oil and gas industries. Kiriloff’s job was to do the design work to convert that supply ship into a 240-foot ferry, and that required shortening her by 24 feet and adding a rounded section to her stern to fit the Authority’s specialized docks.
Aquinnah is Kirilloff’s second conversion for the Authority. The work was performed at Alabama Shipyards, where the ship was hauled out of the water on a marine railway. Then, that 24-foot chunk was neatly cut from her middle and lifted out with a crane. The remaining two sections were slid together, aligned and welded back together again.
Kirilloff and his wife Tressa and their daughter were guests at the Aquinnah commissioning ceremony last month at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. (Tressa Kiriloff operates the LifeBalance pilates studio in Orange Park.)
Aquinnah has the capacity to carry 350 people and 500 tons of cargo. She carries most of that cargo in trucks, and she is a car ferry. Often grouped in “Cape Cod and The Islands,” Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are summer playgrounds for all sorts of Hollywood A-listers and prominent political figures, including the Obamas and Clintons. So, you never know who might be sitting in that Range Rover next to you on the car deck.
As a young man, Kiriloff joined the Coast Guard, which sent him off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study naval architecture. He continued his education at the Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology, which offers courses in fancy yacht design. His new office—his third in Green Cove—is at the Pragmatic Works building overlooking Governors Creek.
BTW
The history of the name Aquinnah is mildly amusing, by the way.
The Aquinnah are the Martha’s Vineyard branch of the region’s Wampanoag Indian tribe, and it’s also the name of a town on the island. The town Aquinnah used to be called Gay Head, which harkened back to days when those words—referring to colorful oceanfront cliffs—were less suggestive of other matters.
In 1998, the locals decided to stop the snickering and re-brand as Aquinnah, the Wampanoag word for “land under the hill.”