Stewart Workman avoided the urge to hunker down when business got tough. Now that’s paying off.

It was 2008, in the throes of the Great Recession. Boatbuilding had dried up. Crews were laid off. Longtime builders know these things are cyclical: Discretionary spending goes away when the economy goes south, but eventually business picks up again. You hunker down and wait.

That’s what Stewart Workman did. Workman is the owner of SW Boatworks in Lamoine, Maine — at the time, a small shop with several craftsmen who finished fiberglass hulls, produced by other yards, for boaters, as well as commercial and sport fishermen.

Many of the hulls that passed through Workman’s doors were designed and produced by Calvin Beal Jr., who lived farther east along the coast on Beals Island, named for his 18th century forebears and still home to many descendants. Beal began building boats, first wood and later fiberglass, in the early 1970s, and his was one of many boat shops in the community. His designs were hugely popular with lobstermen, and they were Workman’s favorite.

Over the years, the two men got to know each other. Workman knew, for example, that Beal was thinking about getting out of boatbuilding to concentrate on his other job, lobster fishing. In fact, Workman had approached Beal two or three times about laying up the Beal molds himself, to keep his own production line going at a steady clip. A year or two passed, the men playing cat-and-mouse.

When the recession steamrolled in, work orders and income dropped off at Workman’s shop. And that’s when Beal told Workman he’d had enough of the business. Did Workman want to buy the molds?

Workman had been around long enough to know that customers would eventually circle back for new boats. So despite the drop-off in business, he stretched himself and made the deal.

“I came home, and my knees were shaking some. I said, ‘Man! I just spent some money!’ ” he recalls, taking a break from a busy day at his yard. “The economy was going to pieces, and I realized that if we didn’t have our own line of boats when the economy came back, we’d be out of business. Either we were smart or we were lucky, but it was the right decision to make. Calvin Beal boats were popular as it was, even through the slow economy, and there was enough trickling through to keep the lights on until things picked up and we started to get crew back.”

Workman grew up in Prospect Harbor, Maine, where his father was a lobster buyer, so he was more or less raised on boats. When he was 6 or 7, he scraped up scrap plywood along the shore, built a shelter on a derelict punt, painted it black and stuck on an old tailpipe he’d found on the road for a make-believe exhaust. “Of course, the thing leaked like a sieve,” he says. “I used to row it around and scoop out the water.”

The family moved to nearby Winter Harbor, and Workman started lobster fishing during high school. After graduation, he went to work for Young Brothers in Corea, Maine, building lobster boats. “I saw all these lobster boats getting built, and I liked lobstering, so I borrowed a great big sack of money — of course, now you can’t buy half a truck for what I borrowed — and bought a boat and went lobster fishing.” It was a struggle; in the early 1980s, the lobster resource was nowhere near today’s abundance.

In his 20s, Workman sold the boat and joined the Coast Guard, traveling, working his way up the ranks and earning certification in a number of specialties. “It was an experience. I’m glad I did it,” he says. When his enlistment period was up, he returned to Maine.

Through the 1990s, he worked in marine construction and boat restoration, fished, and bought and ran an offshore charter fishing boat. But boatbuilding beckoned. By then, Workman had property in Lamoine. He opened a shop in 1999 and went on to finish a number of lobster boats, passenger boats, sportfishermen and yachts. In 2008, the decision to buy the Beal molds changed everything. The designs were always popular. Beal had built more than 120 boats from 34 to 44 feet. His shallow-draft skeg hulls were some of the beamiest, for their length, in the area. They were known for stability, easy sailing, good looks and spaciousness.

“Calvin was known for taking the narrower boats on Beals Island and widening them,” says Workman, who is good friends with Beal. “He took the tumblehome out of the boats and spread them out the other way, making a bigger deck area. At the time, a lot of other builders thought he was crazy. But fishermen fell in love with them because they could get more traps on.”

Once the economy picked up, there was no break in sales. Beals sell themselves, says Workman. There are so many on the water, they act as their own advertisement.

A year later, another iconic shop, Young Brothers Boats — where Workman first learned boatbuilding — was selling its molds for seven boats, ranging from 30 to 45 feet, and they were reasonably priced. Twin brothers Arvin and Arvid and their older brother Colby, over the course of 30 years in business, had produced about 550 built-down lobster boats, popular among commercial fishermen, boaters and sport anglers. Ernest “Nernie” Libby Jr. (Beal’s cousin) designed and built the plugs, which conformed to a traditional 3-to-1 length-to-beam ratio and had a reputation for being handsome, easy-sailing and fast — some of them top contenders on Maine’s lobster boat racing circuit. 

Shortly after Libby’s death in 2012, Workman also bought the molds for a 34 and 38, which Libby had made for his own shop on Beals Island. With his wife, Alice, eventually coming on as business manager, Workman began expanding the market for the Beal designs, offering them to boaters and sport anglers in addition to commercial fishermen. Marketing the Young Brothers designs came more recently, after reconditioning the molds. Why choose one line or the other? “As I put it to fishermen,” Workman says, “some guys like blondes, some like brunettes.”

As demand picked up, Workman’s shop was inadequate. The couple had 23 acres across the street and were planning to build a house. Instead, they put up two sizable buildings, for layup and finish. Today, they’ve sold 30 to 40 Beal boats, including the newest Maine Marine Patrol boat and a research vessel for Stockton University in New Jersey, and seven Young Brothers boats. Booked into 2017, the shop produces 12 to 15 vessels annually.

Earlier this year, Workman was meeting with a Boothbay Harbor lobsterman who was ready to upsize from a 36 Beal to a 38 or 42. Numerous Beals were in production. His layup crew was about to pop a 38 and a 44 from their molds, both for repeat customers. “Just like popping out a baby,” jokes Workman.

Elsewhere, to the tune of rock ’n’ roll and power tools, employees were aligning an engine on a 38 and fairing the gelcoat on a 36. Outside sat the recently completed Black Pearl, a handsome, split-wheelhouse 36 painted glossy black.

In the finish shop, a 38 Beal named All Out was nearly ready to launch for lobstering. With a beam of 15 feet, it’s a modern powerhouse that has a wide, flat deck, twin steering stations and a spacious wheelhouse that looks palatial, compared with the narrow shelters of older lobster boats.

In the next bay over, employees were fairing the gelcoat on Tuna.com, commissioned by Capt. Dave Carraro, one of the stars of the National Geographic Channel reality television show Wicked Tuna (see accompanying story on facing page).

Workman is meticulous, even hyper-organized, about fulfilling customer requirements. He demands excellent workmanship, nothing thrown together. To ensure the company stays that course, he’s ready to let its precipitous expansion settle into a steady rhythm that will endure, able to weather any future ups and downs. He likens that approach to a traditional sensibility.

“I grew up in the fishing business,” he says. “Some of the old-timers said, ‘When the lights go out and you need to hang on, you need to know where to put your hand.’ ”

This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue.