Page 25 - Port of Baltimore - Issue 5 - 2024

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE GENERAL SHIP REPAIR CORP.
“The majority of our
work is tugs, barges,
cruise boats and
fire boats. We also do
topside repairs on larger
vessels and have a
travel team ready to do
emergency repairs on
ready-reserve vessels or
ships in the Port.”
– Ryan Lynch, President,
The General Ship Repair Corp.
D R I V I N G T H E
DIFFERENCE
DRAYAGE • FLATBED • DRY VAN
terminaltransportation.com
that year resulted in turmoil, as it did
for other businesses.
“My great-grandfather actually lost
the business in the Great Depression
and it went up for auction,” said
Ryan Lynch, the company’s current
President and the fourth generation
of the family to be at the helm. But
through a stroke of luck whose exact
nature is lost to memory, Buck Lynch
was able to buy the business back.
“Ships back then were much
smaller, so the company would bring in
ships for topside work at our location,”
Ryan Lynch said. “During the war, they
got very big into production for the war
effort. They had 600 employees at one
point, doing ship conversions.”
In February of 1958, the first
generational changeover took place
when Ryan Lynch’s grandfather,
Charles F. Lynch, was elected
President. Shortly thereafter, in 1961,
the company was newly incorporated
under its current name: The General
Ship Repair Corporation.
As ships increased in size, the
amount of pier-side work General Ship
Repair was doing decreased. “We
started leasing a dry-dock so we could
dock vessels, tugboats and barges,”
Lynch said.
The dry-dock, leased in 1971, was
eventually replaced by one purchased
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