As the president of Alaska Boats and Permits Maddie Lightsey occasionally has to be a super sleuth to prove that a vessel sold is still afloat and not lying on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
“I love a good puzzle, so I’m always up for a challenging problem to work on,” said
Lightsey, relating to the drama behind getting U.S. Coast Guard approval of a larger
boat “with a pretty generic name” purchased by a buyer from New England.
The new owner planned to sail the vessel down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal and up to New England.
ABP had closed on the deal and submitted the required paperwork to the Coast Guard, which issued a letter of deficiency.
“They said they couldn’t process our submission because the vessel in question had been deactivated after the Coast Guard had scuttled it by way of a .50 caliber machine gun a few years prior and it was at the bottom of the Pacific,” she said.
Turned out that the Coast Guard had mistakenly marked the wrong vessel, with a similar generic name, as deactivated. It took some effort to convince the Coast Guard that this vessel was very much not on the ocean floor, she said.
ABP, which will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2027, offers services far beyond listing and brokering sales.
“We help with the things that tend to trip people up,” said Lightsey.
This includes anything from marine documentation on newly built boats or re-documenting vessels following ownership changes to IFQ (individual fishing quota), hired master or emergency transfer applications, to facilitating complex trades or seller-financed sales, assisting with estate liquidation, or facilitating private sales, which include contracts, transfer applications, title searches and lien payoffs, and general escrow services.
The company is seeing an increase in seller-financing arrangements, which are proving a win/win for many buyers and sellers.
“Estate work is often the most meaningful,” Lightsey said. “When a fisherman passes away, families are dealing with grief and complicated assets at the same time, and we can help by taking a small amount of stress off of their plate.”
ABP does not offer services as an appraiser or inspector of boats for sale or purchase, feeling that would be a conflict of interest, but will help coordinate the process. It does encourage buyers to hire an independent marine surveyor and complete any due diligence they’d like, which may include a mechanical inspection, a sea trial, or inspection by a refrigeration tech or a marine electrician.
“All of our boats sell as-is, where-is,” Lightsey said.
“The marine survey and buyer’s own due diligence inform the price or repair negotiation. Sellers who invest in maintenance usually have a much easier time selling their boat to begin with and will typically get a better price for it, but it’s not a requirement,” she said.
ABP dates back to 1997, when Lightsey’s dad, Doug Bowen, started the business with three friends: another small boat fisherman, a retired librarian and tech genius, and an attorney who had argued successfully before the Alaska Supreme Court.
Her dad “had destroyed his back fishing, my mom was raising my sister and me and they needed a career change,” Lightsey said. “I think it felt like a way to remain involved in an industry he loved and stay connected with his friends, without completely destroying his last few spinal discs.”
Bowen still ran his boat for a while after starting ABP, but then hired skippers to run that vessel and focused fully on ABP.
Lightsey meanwhile went to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she met
her future husband, Cody Lightsey, and had no interest in taking over the family business. But after graduating, the couple, being “broke as a joke,” drove to Alaska, where Cody got work as a deckhand in Bristol Bay and she started working for ABP. The couple planned to do this only on a temporary basis.
Fast forward a decade, and Lightsey has taken over ownership while Cody keeps literally everything running from behind the scenes and we’ve expanded the business substantially, she said.
“Neither of us ever thought we’d end up working in this industry, but we enjoy being a part of the industry and have fun working together,” she said. “Life has a funny way of working out exactly how it should and rarely how I thought it would,” said Lightsey, who had at one point considered a career as a neurosurgeon.
Along with her passion for ABP, Lightsey also has an appetite for fisheries politics. Her favorite part of her job is the people she gets to work with. Commercial fishing has science, politics, user group infighting, nature and outdoors (aspects),” she said. She serves on the board of the North Pacific Fisheries Association and participates in the Alaska Board of Fisheries, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council processes.
Over the past three decades new technology has brought many changes to ABP’s ways of doing business.
When they first started up, clients were either local or found ABP in newspaper ads. Contact information lived in rolodexes, deals were made on corded phones, paperwork was drafted on typewriters and routed via express mail, Lightsey said.
“Now our clients come from all across Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. They find us online, documents move electronically and agencies like NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service), USCG (U.S. Coast Guard) and CFEC (Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission) handle much more digitally,” she said.
Starlink, the satellite internet network owned by Elon Musk’s spaceflight company SpaceX, has changed the game and keeps everyone connected almost all the time.
“We notarize documents digitally over video calls for clients that are on a boat 1,000 miles away, and we communicate via text more than anything,” she said.
“Commercial fishing is an ever-changing industry,” she said. “I have no doubt that there are parts of the industry and of our business that will be unrecognizable in just five years. But some things never change. Relationships are important. Every transaction is personal — the industry is built on small businesses and trust is paramount.”
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