As featured in the
Carteret County News-Times
Sunday, September 3, 2007
BY CRAIG RAMEY
Carefully balanced across two sawhorses, a pencil-marked sheet of juniper bows in the middle as James Lewis plops down two photo albums.
Mr. Lewis, a lifetime Harkers Island resident, has been building boats since he was a teenager and now, at 68, he's got the photographs to prove it. Inside the larger of his two albums, he turns through speckled brown pages, pointing out a past filled with shrimp boats, skiffs and sportfishing boats.
His latest project, a 41-foot sportfishing boat, will likely go in the scrapbook next to its kin, which couldn't be more fitting considering most of Mr. Lewis' boats were built with help from either his brother, son or grandson.
Learning the trade was a family affair for Mr. Lewis, as well.
"My father built boats on the side, and I would stay and help him," he said. "I just picked it up, and I was interested in it, too. I started mostly on small stuff and gradually worked up."
A neighbor bought his first complete project; a 17-foot flounder boat, for $5. That would hardly cover the cost of nail's needed for one day of construction on the sportfishing boat in his boathouse today, which will be worth more than $1 million when completed.
But prices aren't the only thing that's seen change. The market has evolved, too. Commercial fishing is no longer the career opportunity it once was for Down East boatbuilders.
"We used to build a lot of workboats in the '70s and '80s," he said. "I hate to see the fishing go downhill like it's going. A feller came here last week ... about us building him a 32-foot workboat. That's the first workboat in three or four years we've had to build. Most of them have been sportboats. The workboat seems like it's a thing of the past."
Mr. Lewis flips another page. Beaming with pride over a 70foot shrimp trawler, he adjusts the bill of his faded camouflage hat. Blazoned across the front is the
phrase: "Speak the Language." For those who don't "speak the language," of boatbuilding that is, the Down East tradition is falling silent under the praises of fiberglass. Like so many wooden skiffs left to rot up and down highways 70, 101 and 12, the craft's foundation is splintering and sinking into the soil ... nearing a point where only a miracle would keep it afloat.
Jimmy Amspacher is hoping Great Marsh Boatworks, his new boatbuilding business in Marshallberg, will be one of those miracles.
"One day somebody will find an old boat in their yard and wonder how it was built and nobody will know," said Mr. Amspacher. "It's all going to be gone. I'm in my 60s and most of the ones I know doing it are older than me."
Like Mr. Lewis, Mr. Amspacher has half a century of boatbuilding experience under his belt but the final product is vastly different. Modern flare, speed and a towering pilothouse have taken a backseat to practicality, round sterns and handheld tillers - but don't tell that to Mr. Amspacher.
"I'm trying to maintain the old way," he said. "I'm not going to build any new modern boats. I'm going to build the old style with round sterns. Old traditional workboats."
That's no easy task considering the competitive market that exists for affordable fiberglass skiffs ranging from 16 to 22 feet. But Great Marsh answered its uphill battle last year with 20 handmade, wooden boats.
"This is a dying art," said Mr. Amspacher. "It used to be, if you needed a boat you went to town, got the lumber and went in the backyard and built a boat. Everybody could build a boat. Now nobody wants to learn it or take it up as a trade."
Not ready to give up hope on the future of traditional boatbuilding just yet, he intends to teach classes in his boathouse to those willing to build their own boat.
It wouldn't be the first time. Mr. Amspacher is a former teacher for boatbuilding classes at the N.C. Maritime Museum's Harvey W. Smith Watercraft Center in downtown Beaufort.
"I've shown quits a few people how to build a boat," he said. "It's nothing complicated. It's a 16-foot flat-bottom skiff and they can take it home in a week."
If for no other reason, it's the simplicity of Great Marsh's boats that make them unique. There is no need for a naval architect, blueprints or computer-generated cutouts of jigs that will later become the boat's framework.
"I do rack of eye building," said Mr. Amspacher. "I see something and I go build it. The old-timers who started that sportfishing industry, those people were artists. They would draw plans but it was more for them than it was for anybody else. The art is gone as far as being able to sit down and take a pile of wood and go build a boat."
For art buffs and historians grasping at romantic notions, Mr. Amspacher has a point. But for those who want a slick, fiberglass boat that's ready in a day, the message falls on deaf ears.
Like cardboard did to wooden crates when it revolutionized the ease of shipping, the introduction of fiberglass has forever changed the boating market.
"There's so many glass boats to choose from now it's had an affect on the business," said Mr. Lewis. "You can get a glass boat and bring it home with you that same evening. You get somebody to build one, and you're going to have to wait for him to build it and you can probably get a glass boat cheaper than you can build one."
Luckily for Mr. Lewis, he's had 53 years to build a reputation that leaves people more than willing to be patient.
Humbled by the longevity and success of his business, he just shrugs and smiles.
"Somebody would want one and I would build another," he said. "And I just kept right on going and it's been my job all these years. We've never advertised. People just talk about it."
On the opposite end of Mr. Lewis' boathouse an antique-looking table saw erupts into a loud screech as the belts and pulleys spin its blade through a slab of juniper.
Stepping outside to get away from the noise, Mr. Lewis points out a model boat that's suspended between two trees by a piece of twine. Derrick Lewis, Mr. Lewis' grandson, leans over to inspect the boat, now shining in the late afternoon sunlight from a heavy coat of varnish.
"That's how they start," Mr. Lewis said, grinning in the direction of his grandson. "He's probably not going to go into it but it won't hurt him to know how to do it."
(Get a look at the county's smaller boatbuilders in the second installment of Life Boat, coming next Sunday in The News-Times.)