Steve Fischer, Last of a Varnishing Breed of Boat Craftsmen

Photo by Len Villano.

Steve Fischer’s business ad reads “Fischer & Daughters Boat Works…Last of a varnishing breed.”

But you won’t see Fischer’s daughters, Alex, 24, and Lucy, 19, working alongside him as he sands and varnishes wooden boats for Door County customers. The addition of daughters to his business name was wishful thinking on Fischer’s part.

Photo by Len Villano.

“I pretty much knew when my daughter Alex was born that I would go with Fischer & Daughters, hoping that some day they would want to learn or carry on the business. I’m not ruling that out yet,” Fischer said. “They live in Minnesota. They’ll come for a day and then they’re ready for Sturgeon Bay or Green Bay or Milwaukee. It’s just too quiet for them. Probably about when they’re 30 they’ll come back and say, ‘Door County is awesome.’”

In the meantime, Fischer works sans daughters.

“I would love to have employees and get bigger, but I have to put my name on the work. I just haven’t found anybody. I guess I’m anal about what I put my name on. I have to be there at every part of it,” he said, which is probably the reason why he has become a well-established presence in the wooden boating community.

“There is a group of wooden boat owners in Door County. If it weren’t for Steve, I don’t know if we could keep going,” said Bill Jacobs, a boating writer who spends six months in Door County and six months in Florida.

Photo by Len Villano.

Jacobs said the last thing he does here before heading south is to pull his boat – which since last year has been a 27-foot wooden sailboat – out of the water and deliver it to Fischer to have it redone for the next season.

“Steve really supports us well and is a unique resource to have,” Jacobs said. “Steve is a great guy. He’s a Door County original as far as I’m concerned, that rarified group of people who really make it what it is.”

Fischer is originally from St. Paul, Minnesota. Before coming to Door County, he ran a boat maintenance business in Marina Del Ray, California, for 11 years. He and his wife at the time were looking to buy a house in Los Angeles, but his wife’s father called to tell them about a motel he ran across that was for sale in a place called Door County.

“I came up here and fell in love,” Fischer said. “I saw all the boats and said, ‘I could live here. I could do this.’ I didn’t know anything about the motel business, but we pushed some financing and got an SBA loan. The next thing I knew I was moving to Sister Bay from Los Angeles.”

Fischer quickly hooked up with Russ Forkert, whose father owned Anchor Marine.

“I started working for Russ at the old cherry plant [on Old Stage Road],” Fischer said. “We had a company called Classic Yacht Works. We bought some old Chris-Crafts that we were going to fix. The business really grew fast.”

In 2004, Fischer decided to set up shop under his own name.

Photo by Len Villano.

“It took a while to let people know I was alone,” Fischer said. “It’s been 10 years since I left Yacht Works and I’ve been doing it 25 on top of that. It’s been up and down. I would finish projects for people and they wouldn’t need me anymore so I’d have to find new clients. There’s always kind of a turnover. I think it took five years before I had the confidence that I could do this up here year round. Some years have been great. Some years have not been so great. You start wondering about getting a job at the Pig or cleaning rooms again. I just seem to get by. But right now things are booming. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m scheduling some stuff a year ahead. It’s really fantastic.”

Fischer has had boat owners in the past who wanted to save costs by interning with him and learning how to do the work on their own.

“They usually only last a couple hours,” he said. “It’s really labor intensive. It’s physically demanding as well. Some of the materials, you need to be careful. It can be mindless sometimes. The most common question is, how do I have the patience to do what I do? It’s kind of a love-hate thing. I can take something that doesn’t look so great and make it look absolutely beautiful. The plumber or electrician, you don’t really see their work. Everybody sees my stuff.”

Photo by Len Villano.

And seeing his work is often a great selling point for more work.

“I might be on one dock for a couple months. I’ve done a couple boats at Fish Creek right on the sidewalk. Everybody walks by and sees how good it looks. Just by doing some boats I get more jobs just being there at the dock. Somebody sees what I’m doing and they ask me about working on their boat,” he said. “And not a lot of people do what I do. On my car and ad it says I’m the last of a varnishing breed. It’s a little bit more of a specialty than painting. I’ve been doing it for 35 years, so I’m getting better at it.”

Knowing that the varnish man is the last on the boat owner’s long list of maintenance and upkeep, Fischer said he is willing to work out arrangements with boat owners.

“I can do whatever people want to do,” he said. “I give them that option. Let’s do what we need to do to keep it floating.”

Don and Jean Thompson of Door County Bakery had their 1965 Thompson Runabout restored by Fischer in installments.

Photo by Len Villano.

“It was in really good shape, but it needed to be taken to the next level,” Thompson said. “Steve worked on that boat for three winters now and it’s complete. It’s in show shape. It’s a 1965 18-foot runabout made in Peshtigo. Beautiful, beautiful work he did. He restored it to its original tone, and it’s great. His work is great.”