The direction the birds are flying is drawing away from the name. Perhaps better to have them flying toward the right and flying into the box instead of out of it?

hmmn. good suggestion.

the sheild/duck crest is a legacy mark evolution in a way. chris-craft used a shield at some point with quadrants that also contained a sailboat (despite the fact that they made motorboats)--see attached. the guy who started the company (long-ago now) started by building duck hunting boats (as opposed to luxury motorboats) and presumably because of that, the pair of ducks is on the company crest.

the boat club has used their own variation of the chris-craft shield as a logo for some time now (since mid-70s)--see attached. at first it appears that they just wholesale appropriated the crest, and only dropped the club name into it. at some point they erased a picture of a sailboat from one quadrant of the crest, and moved the ducks into it (leaving one quadrant empty for 10 years). later on someone drew (poorly) a motorboat into the other quadrant. but the ducks have remained, despite these (and other, smaller) changes. so basically i condensed it down even further to just the ducks and the shield.

i wonder if moving the crest to a different location with respect to the word mark would make a difference???

Ok. Fair enough. What if you moved the shield to the right? Might be nice to make an instance of the logo with the type as two lines also.

well, perhaps this is a boring mark, dunno. i guess i'm wondering specifically is the crest/mark too cramped? how can it be a bit more readable? do the letterforms seem even?

Mark: There is quite a lot of space behind the birds within the shield. This seems unbalanced to me.

Logotype: The type is nice. Did you modify something? I really like the R.

Without seeing how you might use it is difficult to make any sort of judgement beyond the mark and logotype.

I still think you should explore stacking the type. Where else will this be used?

thanks for the feedback.
it's true, the name is quite long.
the type is custom, not a font or modified font.
though it's certainly inspired by deco lettering.
the uses are pretty standard: letter, web, forms, though there might be some wildcards like a badge or sticker...
i wanted to keep it simple at least for now--i.e. b&w, flexible relationship between mark and type.
the balance starts to get at what i see as a problem.
i'll have to play around with that a bit.