Flush with potential for a rebound

DRAINING WORK: Terri Cortvriend, president of Ocean Link, founded the company with her husband, Andy, in the late 1980s. Ocean Link found its niche in marine plumbing and toilets. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
DRAINING WORK: Terri Cortvriend, president of Ocean Link, founded the company with her husband, Andy, in the late 1980s. Ocean Link found its niche in marine plumbing and toilets. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

It’s often the case that good business opportunities follow the least-glamorous products – and so it was with Ocean Link and marine toilets.
The company’s husband-and-wife founders, Terri and Andy Cortvriend, met in the much more glamorous world of tropical yacht charters, where they worked on vessels traveling from Florida to the Caribbean.
But eventually their travels took them north to Rhode Island, where they worked for Little Harbor Yacht Brokers in Portsmouth, and eventually settled down.
Looking to start their own business, the couple realized they needed a specialty within the marine trades and a specific product to feature at boat shows.
Although Rhode Island has never been short of boat-building and marine businesses, in the 1980s few companies had decided to focus on the emerging area of marine plumbing and toilets, which gave Ocean Link an opportunity.
“We realized we were getting more calls for toilets than anything else,” Terri Cortvriend said. “No one was really doing toilets at the time.”
By 1990, Ocean Link had found its niche and, fortuitously, it was one about to grow through the next decade as new clean-water regulations hit the boating industry and elevated the importance of marine plumbing.
Traditionally, even as sanitation rules on land became more stringent, recreational boaters had relative freedom to discharge waste in coastal waters.
But starting with the federal Clean Water Act in 1972 and increasing throughout the next two decades, rules prohibiting sewage discharges tightened. In 1998 Rhode Island made it illegal to release sewage in the ocean within three miles of shore.
Ocean Link expanded from toilets into holding tanks, as they became mandatory for vessels with sanitation systems.
“We were in the right place at the right time,” Cortvriend said.
In addition to changing boaters’ habits, the new rules added new importance to vessel plumbing systems, especially the holding tanks that keep sewage out of the water until a boat gets to a pumping station.
Cortvriend said in the early days, even well-appointed vessels that had holding tanks often wouldn’t use them because the systems were difficult to operate, would often back up or smell. “A lot more people tell me they feel very uncomfortable pumping overboard and that is a very different sentiment than 15 years ago,” Cortvriend said.
As Ocean Link grew with the demand for marine plumbing systems, the company branched out from sanitation into other areas like drinking water, air conditioning and fuel tanks. The company also winterizes some vessels that stay year-round in Portsmouth.
In addition to carrying drinking water in tanks, many large yachts now make their own through reverse-osmosis desalination units, which Ocean Link sells and installs. And as the technology gets better and becomes less expensive, smaller vessels are now taking advantage of it.
At its pre-recession peak, Ocean Link had grown to 10 full-time employees, but the economic downturn hit the recreational boating industry particularly hard and the business was forced to downsize.
A much greater blow came just before the recession in 2006 when Andy Cortvriend died, leaving his wife to run the business on her own.
She grew up in Miami and was 19 years old when she discovered that you could make a living working on boats and sailing to tropical islands.
In the years she and her husband were working on charter boats, Cortvriend said they considered settling in the Caribbean, but on many of the islands the legal hassles of a business in a foreign country were a barrier.
The couple first moved to Rhode Island as part of the seasonal migrations that much of the boating world travel in.
Within that community, people in Rhode Island and Florida aren’t that different, Cortvriend said, although she does find Aquidneck Island a nicer place than Fort Lauderdale.
From the depths of the recession, Cortvriend said sales have picked up in the past year and are looking up. She hopes to eventually grow the business back above the double-digit-employee mark it had in 2007, but just surviving the tough times without her husband and co-founder has been enough of a challenge.
“For me to just be here today is a major accomplishment,” Cortvriend said. •

COMPANY PROFILE
Ocean Link
Owner: Terri Cortvriend
Type of Business: Marine plumbing
Location: 3 Maritime Drive, Portsmouth
Employees: 7
Year Established: 1989
Annual Sales: NA

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