Diagnose before you sell
Nobody leaves here with parts they didn't need. We test, we measure, and we show you what we found before we quote the repair.
About the shop
Built on Lake Cumberland, for people who run it
Bluegrass Marine Works is a family-owned repair shop off Highway 90 in Bronston — close enough to the water that most customers stop in with the boat still hitched.
Owner's story
Jake Thornton
Jake started sweeping floors and hauling gas cans at a Lake Cumberland marina when he was fifteen. By nineteen he was pulling lower units, and by his mid-twenties he'd earned his Mercury and MerCruiser certifications working for one of the larger dealers in the region.
What he saw there stuck with him: good families getting handed four-figure estimates for problems nobody had actually diagnosed. So in 2013 he leased a two-bay building in Bronston, put his own name behind the work, and started fixing boats the way he'd want his own fixed.
Today the shop runs three bays and a mobile service truck, with Jake's wife Erin handling scheduling and his oldest working summers cleaning props. It's still a family operation, and it still runs on the same simple deal: find the real problem, quote it honestly, and get folks back on the water.
"If I can't explain the repair to you in plain English, I don't understand it well enough to charge you for it."
How we work
Four rules we don't bend
Clean work, every time
Wiring gets loomed and labeled. Bilges get wiped down. Your boat comes back the way we'd want ours returned.
Talk plain
You'll get a phone call and photos, not a mystery invoice. If a repair isn't worth the money on an older hull, we'll say so.
Lake time is short
Kentucky's season runs hard from April to October. We schedule realistically and tell you the truth about turnaround.
Where we work
Bronston, Somerset, Burnside, Monticello, Nancy, Jamestown, Russell Springs and every marina and dock on Lake Cumberland.
Come see the shop
Stop by the bay off Highway 90 in Bronston, or send us a note and we'll call you back the same business day.