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It's an unpretentious place, Mayea Boat Works: little more than a bunch of corrugated-steel sheds, barns, and boathouses hunkered by the waters of Michigan's Lake St. Clair. If you were in a hurry and intent on getting to better-known lakeside vacation spots like Algonac or St. Clair Shores, you'd probably just drive on through the town of Fairhaven and never notice the sign by the side of the road that proclaims "Mayea Marine Store." Such an oversight would be truly unfortunate, though, because inside the store, in addition to the shiny new cans of varnish and the shelves full of WEST SYSTEM® epoxy paraphernalia, you'd likely come across a lady named Flo. And Flo's the gal who, when she's not answering the phone for Mayea Boat Works, keeping the company's books, ordering parts, and paying the bills, can tell folks where they can find Larry Mayea.
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Mayea's a fascinating guy, but hard to keep tabs on, for any number of reasons. Maybe it's because he's got the kind of metabolism that inhales a 60-hour workweek and keeps right on truckin'. Or maybe it's because, having got his start by sweeping floors in the woodworking shop when he was just ten, he's simply accustomed to hard work and staying abreast of all things great and small, both hither and yon. Or maybe—and this is what I personally believe—Mayea's just like the other four principals of Mayea Boat Works: his 83-year-old father Herb (who continues to walk three miles a day for exercise, although he just cut back to a 45-hour workweek), his younger brother Donny, his brother-in-law Norm, and his son Chad. They're all so synched into plank-on-frame mahogany boatbuilding that trying to keep up with just one of them for two days 'bout wore me plumb out, as we like to say in the sunny South.
Of course, I loved every minute of it, although in actuality two days isn't a real long time to get a proper handle on what goes on at Mayea Boat Works, where Mays-Craft boats are built. For one thing, the place is inscrutably old—it first opened its big double doors in July 1903, which made it 100 years old the day I arrived to begin gaping and scratching my head in amazement. Mayea Boat Works has withstood the building of Navy seaplanes during WWI, the hard days of the Great Depression, a couple of Prohibition shootouts, the creation of prototype landing craft during WWII, and a vast and disastrous fire that almost burned the whole shebang to the ground. Even most of the tools the guys use are old.
The big planer in the woodworking shop, for instance, is about the same age as Herb, who refuses to switch over to a fancy new one. The old one's made of solid-cast, he says, and heavy enough to stay put while a fellow single-handedly planes a mahogany plank. Then there's the adze Herb uses to swiftly, unerringly, and gracefully hew stems and prepare the outboard surfaces of frames for planking—the darn thing's 150 years old, according to Herb, the Michelangelo of South American mahogany. And finally there are the numerous drawers in the shops and sheds filled with ancient block planes, jack planes, spoke shaves, and other fantastically shaped woodworking implements, many borrowed from the realm of the violin maker. Many of these date back four generations when Herb's French Canadian grandfather built boats in the wilds of our neighbors to the north.
But here's a detail that was a little tough to get my mind around during my stay at the Boat Works (at least at first): Despite the elemental nature of the raw materials and hand tools the Mayea family uses to fashion custom Mays-Craft runabouts, speedboats, sport cruisers, and fishboats, there's a considerable amount of cutting-edge technology that goes into each new launch. Moreover, much of the very same technology is subtly applied to each restoration the company does, whether it's of a 47-foot Chris-Craft Commander or one of Gar Wood's old Harmsworth Trophy winners.
"Not to do this kinda thing would be like saying I prefer manual steering because that's the way they used to do things in the old days," Larry laughs. "It's just not sensible."
So a brand-new boat from the Mayeas may look, feel, and even smell like a plank-on-frame mahogany antique, but at the heart of this charming illusion dwells sophisticated WEST SYSTEM® epoxy products, okoume and sapele plywood, Awlgrip paint, modern, computer-modeled lines and running surfaces, and the supersize powerplants the Mayeas sometimes favor (like big Hemi V-8s and fire-breathing 12-cylinder Italian BPMs). All these things will keep a Mays-Craft looking foxy-fine forever. And, more than likely, sounding that way, too.
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