This article is from the summer 2024 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Caine O’Rear
My dad bought his Stauter in 1984. He got it from a guy who worked at Delchamps on Old Shell Road who was pulling up stakes and moving to the Big Easy. The boat was a 16-foot, 1966 Aqua Queen, painted in two-toned black and white with a racing stripe indent on the upper hull. He paid less than a princely sum for it.
It was the second Stauter made that year. The serial number on the keel reads 660002.
I don’t remember him buying the boat as I was only five years old at the time. But I do recall my time in it during the ensuing years. I have vivid memories of learning to ski behind it on Cypress Garden trainers at Point Clear, not far from the Grand Hotel. I remember seeking shelter under the bow as we raced back from Sand Island on summer afternoons — when thunderstorms would appear out of nowhere and turn the skies from blue to black in the space of a Steely Dan song, threatening death-by-lightning-strike. I can still smell the salt and mahogany under the bow and hear the sound of the waves slamming into the boat with a ferocity that was, I believed at the time, certain to leave us shipwrecked. Indeed this was not a craft made for easy rides on the storm-tossed sea. But nothing ever happened and in its 40-year history with my family, the boat has never sprung a leak.
In my first years on the water I don’t think I was aware of any boats other than Stauters. All my parents’ friends had them (mostly the popular 15-and-a-half-foot Cedar Point Special model). Stauters were to the Bay what oak-paneled Chevy station-wagons were to the parking lot of the A&P — they were everywhere. I do recall the first time I rode in a Boston Whaler and being thoroughly unimpressed, disgusted almost. The boat was cold, impersonal, and just plain ugly — a symbol of the overly efficient, industrial North. All utility and no style. And what was with this fiberglass stuff? The Stauter had elan; it was a patriot of our seas.
The history of Stauter Boat-Works has been told elsewhere, most eloquently in a Wooden Boat magazine profile from the early ’80s. The company was started in 1947 by Lawrence Stauter and taken over by the Lami Brothers (the grandsons of Lawrence’s first-cousin) in 1979. The old boat works stood on the Causeway (you could rent Stauters for the day back then) until Hurricane Frederick showed up and reminded everyone who was in charge. In its heyday, Stauter was building an impressive 400 boats a year — and all of them by hand. The Lami Brothers continued to build the boats at the new location on Three Notch Road in Tillman’s Corner for another thirty-one years. Production ceased in 2010.
My father’s favorite memories of the Aqua Queen revolve around family and friends, of teaching us to ski behind it, as well as teaching the next generation of grandchildren. He has fond memories of taking it up into the Delta with friends in the ’80s and ’90s and finding the redfish honey-holes that seem so much harder to locate these days.
The Aqua Queen is not as ubiquitous as other models like the Cedar Point Special, and it draws inquiring looks as we cruise the bays and creeks around Perdido Beach and Josephine. It is a show-piece that is not ready to retire. In 2009 it placed third in the Pirates Cove Wooden Boat Festival — a contest that mostly features touring show-boats on trailers.
“I get a lot of thumbs up on the water, and that’s about it. And a lot of waves,” my dad says when asked about the reaction the Aqua Queen elicits these days. “I once got stopped by the marine police. I wasn’t doing anything illegal. He just stopped me because he wanted to look at the boat.”
Photo credit: Images by Aryn Hoge and Caine O’Rear. Top image: Caine O’Rear III pilots his ’66 Aqua Queen in Soldier Creek.
