The Pioneers

The way Calvin Beal, Jr. remembers things, Osmond Beal was right to be steamed.

It all went down around 1980, as best as Calvin can recall. He’s 79 now, and, as he says, “It’s been a while.” But the gist of the story is that Colby Young and his little brothers, the twins Arvin and Arvid, started approaching boatbuilders on Beals Island in Maine. The Youngs had a proposition for them.

A bunch of builders with the last name Beal were well-known among the island’s 700 or so residents. Willis Beal, Osmond Beal, Wayne Beal, Clinton Beal and Calvin himself were members of a big, knotty family tree grown from shop-floor sawdust, with a lot of the islanders having helped their fathers and uncles and cousins and friends build wooden boats since they were little kids. By 1980, the Beals Island builders were renowned for being master craftsmen of lobstering boats. They were, in virtually every sense, a family with a culture all their own.

“If someone ran short of lumber, or if they needed to borrow a tool or fasteners or anything, they could just go to another shop,” Calvin recalls. “If someone had what they needed, they’d let them borrow it and pay them back later. All the builders were very accommodating to the other.”

The proposition Colby and the twins offered was to make molds of the wooden Beals Island boats so they could start turning them out in fiberglass from their Young Brothers yard—an idea that, at least at first, struck more than a few Beals Island guys as trying to go lobstering in a Clorox bottle. “Osmond Beal was offered first, and he turned Young Brothers down,” Calvin says. “He was building a lot of wooden boats—I say a lot of boats. If you built two or three a year, that’s a lot of boats. He was afraid he’d lose his customers.”

So, the Youngs went over to the wharf and picked out the nicest-looking boat they saw in the cove. It was an Osmond 38. The lobsterman who’d commissioned it was fixing up his traps when the Youngs approached him. “They went down and offered him a new fiberglass boat if they could use his boat to make a mold,” Calvin says. “It was legal because nobody had a patent on the boats. We didn’t have any patents or anything; we were just building boats for customers.”

About a year after Young Brothers made that mold, Calvin’s brother-in-law, Ernest Libby, offered to work with them on a whole line of fiberglass versions of the Beals Island boats, from about 33 to 45 feet long. “The fishermen started to get interested in it,” Calvin says. “A wooden boat, there was so much care—you had to spend two or three weeks getting your boat dried out and painting it. The fiberglass was low maintenance, so they just kept working.”

This was a key chapter in the beginning of the end of traditional wooden-boat construction on Beals Island, where the locals created a style of lobster boat that generations of lobstermen sought, and that continues to influence boat design today.

Beals Island builders take great pride in their skeg-built hulls, which are crafted on a solid keel with the timbers notched into it. The general hull design differs from what they call built-down boats found along other parts of the Maine coast, where the timbers are bent, curved and fastened into the bottom part of the keel. The skeg boats, they say with great pride, are fast and steady and trustworthy, including if you run ashore. “They were building boats for themselves, to catch lobster and fish, and they ended up building the best boats, then they figured out how to sell them to people,” says Daniel Sheldon Lee, author of The Maine Lobster Boat: History of an Iconic Fishing Vessel. “These boats are all over the place now. They’re in lakes, they’re out in the Pacific, they’re in the Midwest—more people know about these boats than you realize.”

The Beals Island Style

Each of the Beals Island builders had his own signature when building a lobster boat (say, using four panes instead of three in the windshield), but the skeg-built hull was the constant. To the casual observer, all the Beals Island lobster boats looked alike above the waterline. “The general look was a high bow, a low stern, a long, graceful run and a flared bow to some degree,” says Sam Murfitt, a sternman for Isaac Beal. But the boatbuilders themselves could tell who had built which boats.

Willis Beal, for instance, says he added extra wood in certain places.

“I brought the sharp risers right up to the floor level. That’s the cross pieces that sit in the bottom between the timbers, next to the hull,” Willis says. “I’d bring those up so it was fastened to solid wood. I felt that made it a lot stronger, because I could see, over the years, that the boats would give up at the turn of the bilge if they didn’t have that extra support higher. You’d see a seam open up, and you couldn’t caulk it because it’d just get bigger, because the timbers let go. But with the sharp risers the way I put them in, they were above the level of water, and there was less give in the bilge.”

Today, wooden boatbuilding on Beals Island is vanishing. Several experts point to the Holland 32 as one of the last remaining descendants of the genre. Glenn Holland says he first saw the Beals Island boats when he was a kid growing up in Stonington, Maine: “I didn’t know it at the time—when you’re 8 or 9, you don’t know what you’re looking at. But later on, I found out it was the Beals Island boats that I was attracted to. They had lines that flowed together and looked right.”

Holland started out in the 1970s by finishing hulls that other people had built. Then, demand increased for “bigger” boats, such as moving from a 30-footer to a 32 to carry more gear. Holland worked with Royal Lowell—the son of Will Frost, a third-generation boatbuilder from Nova Scotia who is widely credited with having created modern lobster-boat styling on Beals Island after moving there around 1912—to create the Holland 32 design.

That same Holland 32 is still being ordered today, with a price tag of $200,000 to $300,000. “We have two of them in the shop we’re working on right now,” Holland said in May. “But now it seems to be the pleasure-boat people buying them, not the fishermen. It’s all about the looks.”

It’s also about the speed, he says: The Beals Island guys still want to win the lobster-boat races that were big throughout the 1980s and ’90s, and that are still held during the summers. According to Wellington Yacht Partners, Hull No. 11 of the Holland 32, named the Red Baron, creamed everyone else at the races when it achieved a top speed of 57.8 mph. As Holland tells the story of that accomplishment in 2000: “I’ve had one going almost 60 miles an hour with a 1,000-horsepower big-block Ford, give or take 100 horsepower. That was a pure, unadulterated race motor in that thing.”

Connoisseurs of the Beals Island style can also place an order for a fiberglass version with H&H Marine, which builds Osmond’s designs, or with SW Boatworks. Its founder, Stewart Workman, bought the Calvin Beal, Jr. models in 2008, followed by the Young Brothers designs in 2009. “The Calvin Beal models, they’re a pretty hot item,” Workman said in May. “When we bought the molds, we bought a 34, a 36, a 38 and a 44 from Calvin himself. At that time, back in 2008, the 44 wasn’t popular because it was a new model. Calvin almost didn’t finish building the plug for it because he didn’t think anybody would want a boat that big.

“Then, I had a whole bunch of people who loved the 38, but they wanted another tier of traps on there, so I came up with the 42,” Workman adds. “My goodness, that thing took off like a scalded rat. We built a bunch of them in a short amount of time.”

As of late May, Workman’s team was finishing a 42 that’s the most expensive he’s ever built: about $2 million. “This boat is loaded with everything: a varnished cherry interior, an Awlgrip hull—everything is fancy,” he says.

Even Calvin is impressed with how far the craftsmanship and materials have come over the years. “It’s just as smooth as painted glass. You can’t feel a thing. It’s unreal,” he says. “I’m used to building lobster boats that we try to do a good job, but it’s no polish job. This stuff will match the Hinckleys. It’s excellent.”

Wanted: The Next Generation

During the heyday of Beals Island wooden-boat building, there were 16 or 17 shops on the island; today, only a few are left, says Jon Johansen, president of the nonprofit Maine Built Boats, which aims to strengthen and expand Maine’s boatbuilding industry.

“It’s too bad that kids aren’t picking up how to do some of the boatbuilding,” Johansen says. “They were pushed away from trades for the last 40 years.”

Holland says his 24-year-old grandson is now running his shop, having started out sweeping the floors at age 7. “He likes that style of boat, so he’ll keep on with it,” Holland says. “As long as people want them, he’ll keep building them.”

Workman says he’s also looking for the next generation to take over production on the Calvin Beal and Young Brothers molds. He’ll be 60 on his next birthday, and his wife, Alice, is 63. “We’re starting to think about retiring a little bit,” Workman says. “It’s time for someone that’s a little younger that has some more ideas to carry the torch for a little while.”

This past spring, Workman listed all his molds for sale, hoping someone else will want to carry on the legacy of the Beals Island builders. “It’s amazing what they have done,” he says. “They built the whole Maine coast, as far as the marine industry, for developing all these different models. It’s a lost art, and it’s sad to see some of these older guys getting out of the business. They’re gorgeous boats. That’s the pioneers of the lobster boat right there.”

However the designs might evolve next in fiberglass, the modern construction materials can’t change the mark that Beals Island builders made on lobster-boat history. The wooden-boat designs from the Beals, the Libbys, Fred Lenfesty and other Beals Islanders, set the tone for what’s out on the water today, and what’s likely to still be out on the water for years to come.

“Twenty or 30 years of hard work will end a lot of wooden boats,” Calvin says. “A fiberglass boat will outlive a man.” 

The Maine Lobster Boat

A book published in September 2022, has Downeast boat aficionados aflutter. Author Daniel Sheldon Lee, a senior architect for Microsoft, said he got the idea to write The Maine Lobster Boat while commuting on a ferry to Boston. “I kept looking at these lobster boats as I took the ferry, and I got interested in the design,” he says. “I just loved the way they look.”

He spent a year doing interviews and learning the lobster boat’s history, including stories from Beals Island that date back to a man named Will Frost. Frost moved from Nova Scotia to Beals Island around 1912 and is widely credited with setting modern boatbuilding in motion on the island. “All the other builders started working with him and copying him,” Lee says. “He basically trained the builders on the island, and his influence spread right down to the present day.”

Yes, Lee says, there are disagreements about who should get credit for what throughout the years. “There are so many disputes,” he says, but he wanted to document as much of the history as he could, along with giving voice to present-day builders like Doug Dodge, who likely represents the last of the pure Beals Island traditions.

“He’s a great guy,” Lee says. “He just built a retro Beals Island wooden lobster boat called Uncle Harold, which is named after Harold Gower, who was like his adopted father and his great uncle. He just put that boat in the water. It’s beautiful, and it’s very, very fast. And he’s the great-grandson of Will Frost, working in the same shop where Will Frost had his shop a hundred years ago. The lineage is there.” —K.K.

This article was originally published in the August 2023 issue.