Mike Nyboe works in his office at Bittersweet Landing in South Bristol. Nyboe credits his wife, Charlotte, for doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes while he gets to be the public face of the business. “Without her, I would be lost,” he said. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Every June for the last 27 years, the South Bristol community convenes at a local boat launch to witness the launch of skiffs built by members of the South Bristol School’s eighth grade class with support from volunteers at Maine Maritime Museum in Bath.
For years the skiffs were launched from the Bittersweet Landing Boatyard although it has moved over to the public landing near the South Bristol Co-op. For all of those years Bittersweet Landing Boatyard owner Mike Nyboe has done the honors of lowering the boats into the water.
As he has every year since 2013, when a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit put the school on notice a traditional blessing of the fleet at a school function was a constitutional violation, Nyboe has added his own touch to the proceedings. At some point, Nyboe pauses dramatically and announces his hay fever has been acting up.
He punctuates the complaint with a window-rattling sneeze, typically drawing a heartfelt “God bless you” from the assembled. A blessing of sorts delivered, the launch almost always proceeds smoothly thereafter.
“I have to give one of my customers credit,” Nyboe said. “He said, ‘Hey, Mikey, you should just sneeze and have everybody say, God bless you’ … The first time we did it nobody knew that was happening. Only me and about a dozen other people knew. We didn’t tell any of the school people. We didn’t tell any of the parents.”
Whatever the opinions of “people from away,” Nyboe loves the boat-building program and is a proud supporter.
“It’s fabulous program,” he said.
Today, Nyboe is part of the fabric of South Bristol. He said he is from Round Pond and his heart and soul belong to Maine, but the man himself was born in Virginia. Nyboe’s father, Ken, was a summer person, a Brooklyn, N.Y. native who met his future wife, Helen Louise Bryant, at pre-WWII dance at Lakehurst Lodge in Damariscotta.
After the war, during which he served in the Army, Ken Nyboe attended the University of Maine Orono. After graduating in 1950, he took a civilian job working for the U.S. Navy and moved his family to Alexandria, Va. where Mike Nyboe was born in 1963, eight years after his older brother.
Part of Ken Nyboe, though, never really left Maine. In 1955 the family bought some property in Round Pond and built a summer cottage, with Ken Nyboe hiring many of the local boys to help out. For the next two decades, the Nyboes were annual visitors.
“My parents would come every summer,” Mike Nyboe said. “I never made it to the first day of school or the last day of school in Virginia, because we were driving 650 miles from Virginia to Maine or from Maine to Virginia. I didn’t go to the first day of school until I started my junior year in high school, which I started at Lincoln Academy.”
Round Pond, Nyboe said, was a great place to grow up. Fortunately for a kid who liked boats, Nyboe caught on with Padebco Boatyard when he was still in high school.
He had been working for Padebco for 13 years off and on when the Bittersweet Landing Boatyard came up for sale around 1992. The previous owner, Lowell Percival, was looking to get out, Nyboe said. At the same time, Pete McFarland was looking to get out of his boat-building business in Christmas Cove, which left another 20-30 boat owners looking for a new place to store and service their boats.
“(Lowell) was deciding, ‘Yeah, this is fine. I like this, but it isn’t what I want to end up doing,’” Nyboe said. “And he was getting older, so those additional 25 boats out of Christmas Cove were a little more than he needed. I was brave enough to step up to the plate. Or foolish enough, that could be a factor as well … When I got here, there were 39 boats in the yard. Right now, (March 8) we’re somewhere upwards of 300.”
In 1992, Nyboe bought the business on a lease to own and completed the purchase the following year. By then he and his wife, Charlotte, moved to South Bristol full time. They still work together today, living in an apartment on the premises.
“Charlotte is an integral part of my world,” Mike Nyboe said. “My father’s exact words were ‘Behind every successful man is his wife pushing him every inch of the way.’ That’s a true statement. Charlotte works twice as hard as I do. I get to be the voice and the face, but she’s the one. She’s lugging and moving and driving and doing all those kinds of things too”
Year-round, Nyboe has five full-time employees in addition to he and his wife. In the summer, he has up to 12 people working at the boatyard.
“There’s seven of us all winter long,” he said. “We got plenty of things to do, and maintenance is a big thing that we try and get done on those things. There’s always something to fix and repair, and you always get behind on those things in the wintertime. But as a general rule, there’s always plenty to do.”
Not only is Bittersweet a full-service boatyard where boat owners can get their boats built, repaired, customized, outfitted, and refitted, but Nyboe is a full-service community member. In the years before the Gut Bridge was replaced in 2016, he was often called when the aging bridge was stuck open, as it frequently was.
“In the wintertime, the gears were so worn that what would happen if someone got an inch or 2 inches too far, the gears would just spin by each other and it wouldn’t engage,” he said. “At the time, I had a three-quarter or a one-ton wrecker with a winch body on it. I’d drive to the bridge, and I throw a piece of rope off to whoever the bridge tender was at the time, and they pull the rope across … We left a strap right on the side of the bridge, because it was always happening, and three or four times a winter, I’d have to drive over there, throw them a winch cable.”
While Nyboe works hard and isn’t afraid of long hours, truth be told, there are few things he enjoys more than creating or designing something, often using plastic Lego bricks. He still has the first Lego set he ever received in 1968 or 1969, he said, and has built up quite a collection over the years.
“I do have a very bad plastic brick habit,” he said. “I’ve been collecting and building Lego for 40 years. I’m affectionately referred to as an AFOL – an adult fan of Lego.”
For most of the 2010s, Nyboe was involved with the Kora Temple in Lewiston. Every year the Shriners would host the Festival of Trees, for which entrants decorated a tree that was then raffled off. For the price of a $2 ticket, the lucky winner could take home the tree, the ornaments, and everything underneath it.
If there one thing Nyboe loves almost as Lego bricks, it would be Christmas trees, and he’s competitive. Every year, he erects 13 Christmas trees in what was his mother-in-law’s house in Wilton. Each tree has a room and is decorated according to a theme.
For the Shriners, one year he built a Grinch out of Lego, made 100 Lego ornaments, added 100 minifigures, as Lego figurines are called, and then he added 50 boxes of Lego under the tree.
“I think this was the first year I was the lead sponsor, and my lovely bride explains to me that I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, because it only takes $3,500 to win a very nice $9 plaque that says I’m the lead sponsor,” Nyboe said.
Another year, the theme focused on “The Nutcracker,” so Nyboe repeated the feat of decorating the trees creating a 42-inch high, 35-pound Nutcracker, made out of Lego for the top of the tree. Other tree toppers over the years have included Olaf from “Frozen” and the Abominable Snowmonster of the North from “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
“One year was ‘White Christmas,’ but I didn’t think Bing Crosby or Rosemary Clooney would look good on top of the tree, so I made a stormtrooper with a Santa hat on it,” he said. “That was a big hit, the stormtrooper.”
Nyboe loved supporting the Shriners but he has not returned to the temple since the COVID-19 pandemic. Although he has been invited back, he just hasn’t found the time, he said
His passion for Lego, however, is undimmed. Over the years he has encouraged his family members to gift him Lego products for the holidays and he has built quite a stock. His inventory of building bricks alone fills enough full-size Home Depot totes that he has five or six pallets, each loaded with eight to 10 fully loaded totes
“Charlotte says, ‘You know, I think this is a problem when you have to move your building bricks with a fork truck,’” Nyboe said. “I said ‘I own three fork trucks. It’s not a problem.’”
Some of the sets he has collected over the years are highly prized by collectors, but Nyboe said Lego is not about the money for him. It’s the entire process of coming up with the idea and seeing it to fruition.
“My father used to make note if what you end up with is what you started with in your mind, something has died in infancy,” he said. “You need to be adapting and adjusting and figuring out as you go, and that’s part of the reason I love this boat world as well, because I get something started to build, and I go, ‘No, that would work a lot better. That’s a much better idea.’”
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