To stay dry on the water, they’ve got you covered

By Jaedda Armstrong

Brian Johnson stood inside a small center-console fishing boat docked beside a home in the Bay Island section of Virginia Beach.

With a drill in hand, he began to make numerous tiny holes around the gunwale.

Johnson, working with his brother Dan, was preparing to install a three-sided enclosure around the boat’s cockpit, seat and steering controls.

“If a wave were to come up and hit the boat the way it is now, it would go right into this windshield and in the owner’s face,” Brian Johnson said . “After we put this enclosure around the console, he will be warm and dry.”

The brothers have worked at their father’s shop, Mike’s Marine Custom Canvas off Shore Drive in Virginia Beach, for the past 14 years. Mike’s Marine is one of at least six shops in the boat canvas business in Hampton Roads, according to the Marine Fabrication Association’s Web site. There’s also a number of sailmakers.

For as long as people have been taking to the water aboard boats, there’s been a market for covers and enclosures. But it largely remains a local, cottage industry.

Though they serve a sizable community of boat owners in Hampton Roads, most of the local shops are small businesses, often family-run operations such as Mike’s Marine.

The small shop has six employees: Mike Johnson; his wife, Kathy; his two sons; and two full-time seamstresses.

“This is a niche market. I guess you can call it low-key,” said Mike Johnson, who said a large portion of his customers have old boats they want to refurbish. “I compare ourselves to home renovation, except we’re doing renovations on boats.”

Despite the recession, business is at the same pace it was last year, he said: “Pretty good.”

Retirees are buying waterfront property and using their boats more, he said. Some people are buying used boats and fixing them up. Others are buying new boats and want to add enclosures or fabric on the boat’s rooftop. One Mike’s Marine customer now lives in his boat and asked to have a back porch built for it.

Mike’s Marine has a customer base of about 1,000, and the shop usually completes 300 to 400 jobs a year, Mike Johnson said. It has a backlog of jobs that will last until February.

Business has slipped a little – but not much – at Little Bay Canvas on 21st Street in Norfolk, said Marie Kirk, its owner. Revenue is off 5 percent compared with last year for the shop, which has been in operation for more than 30 years, she said.

Kirk and her four other employees specialize in designing “anything that needs to be on your boat,” from seat cushions and carpet to boat covers and window enclosures.

“The first thing that stops in a recession is people buying luxuries,” Kirk said. “But then you have to realize that people’s boats are an investment. You can’t just let that go. You have to keep it up.”

She notices that instead of getting big jobs done at one time, customers are getting jobs done in intervals. People aren’t spending $10,000 on their boats like they used to, she said.

However, her customer base is growing. Little Bay serves about 500 customers, she said, and completes nearly 1,000 jobs per year.

In December, the shop will move to a larger location on Baker Road in Virginia Beach.

Most of the marine fabrication shops in the area work together, Kirk said. Little Bay has called over to Mike’s Marine plenty of times to ask for advice or to borrow material. They also see each other at national conventions and trade shows.

“Usually competition is so cutthroat, but since there are so few of us, there’s a lot of work to go around,” Kirk said.

One issue facing the marine canvas business, in Hampton Roads and elsewhere, is the lack of people who possess a skill the trade desperately needs: sewing.

“Sewing is a dying art,” Kirk said. “I remember when we used to take home economics in school. I don’t know if they do that anymore. That’s the hard part about filling any openings here.”

Angel Ruffino, Little Bay’s manager, said the only people who are familiar with their line of work are people who own boats. There’s a whole “boating world out there” that some people don’t know about, she said.

It might be that few outside boating know about the industry, but Ruffino is certain it isn’t going away.

“A boat is like a home,” she said. “You have to maintain it or it will fall apart.

Jaedda Armstrong, (757) 222-5846, jaedda.armstrong@pilotonline.com