Delaney Huffman was 17 years old when she saw the guts of a single boat that changed the course of her life.
She grew up on a farm in East Jordan, Mich., where she learned from a young age how to work with big machinery, including combines. Her high school offered an automotive class, which she took for three years. She found a summer job as a hand detailer at Boyne Boat Yard in Boyne City, Mich. It was grunt work, but she figured it would tide her over until after high school, when she planned to enter the high-performance automobile or airplane industries.
But the work she saw happening all around the boatyard grew on her. The technicians got to do all kinds of things with boats that she didn’t even know existed.
“It was really cool just to see the variety and how everything is always upgrading and changing,” she says. “It was fascinating to me.”
Then came that magical day when she got the chance to help launch go-fast boats for the Boyne Thunder annual poker run.
“We just put it in the water and pushed them out,” Huffman says, “but they had all the hatches open with the engines all exposed, and they were the most beautiful engines I had ever seen. Then they fired them up, and that was it. That was for me.”
Huffman, who is now 19, was named one of the American Boat & Yacht Council’s New Achievers in April. The honor is part of the ABYC’s Outstanding Technician Awards, which are sponsored by Yamaha, and which were announced during International Marine Service Technician Week. The New Achiever category is new, created to recognize newcomers who demonstrate outstanding potential and skills.
The story of how Huffman became enamored with recreational marine-industry work is one that ABYC accreditation director Sarah Devlin says she’d like to hear far more often than she hears now.
“One of the challenges is getting the word out to schools and students that a career in the marine industry is a viable and fun option,” Devlin says. “We’re making headway as an industry, and new school programs are popping up — Massachusetts Marine Trades Association and Marine Trades Association of New Jersey come to mind as groups that are trying to nurture younger students. It’s not that students are selecting other industries; it’s that many students don’t know the marine industry is an option. But, once they get into a program and understand that the work can be really interesting and complex, plus they get to mess about in boats, they tend to stick around.”
To try and connect more students, parents and industry professionals with educational programs, the ABYC announced the launch of the Marine Trades School Directory in April. It’s the first and only marine-industry-specific resource of its kind, and is available at abycinc.org/school directory with more than 30 schools listed. Users can filter by program offerings, cost range, available certifications, prerequisites and whether a school holds an ABYC Marine Trades Accreditation.
“We regularly receive calls from individuals looking for training programs, and now we have a centralized resource to guide them to the experience they want, whether that be a full college program or targeted industry training,” Devlin says.
These kinds of programs are key to building the young technicians of tomorrow, says Bryan Collins, service director at Big Thunder Marine, which has multiple locations in Lake Ozark, Mo., — and whose worker Taven Larrance was also named an ABYC New Achiever this year.
“I firmly believe in young intern technicians coming out of school,” Collins says. “I’m super proud of Taven, who puts his work in. He’s taking his training to the next level with us as we pay for the further education for him.”
Collins says he routinely visits schools in the area to tell students that if college isn’t the right path for them, then there are jobs where they can make a good living at $40 or $50 per hour.
“The trades, unfortunately, fell off to the side,” he says. “Everybody went to get a four-year degree to become a doctor, a nurse, a business manager. Everybody thought the trades were dead. When I graduated in the early 1990s, it was ‘you have to get a four-year degree.’ Hopefully, the times are changing.”
Collins says he also tells students that recreational-marine businesses need accountants, human-resources staff, marketers and all kinds of other skillsets. He says he thinks the marine industry would benefit from more professionals helping to get the word out about job opportunities.
“It’s selling what we do for a living. It’s fun, really,” he says. “It’s selling the fun part of the industry. I can’t afford a $500,000 or $1 million boat, but I’ve run quite a few of them and gotten to be on them out on the water. That’s the fun part of this industry.”
And, Collins adds, once some younger people get a real look at the boats — often for the first time in their lives — the industry all but sells itself.
“I have a 19-year-old here now from a small town in the country,” he says. “We took a 38 Fountain out and a MasterCraft and talked to a bunch of seniors and juniors at the school. He jumped on board, and now he’s got certifications. He learned from farm equipment. He’s one heck of a tech.”
Huffman, after that day that she got to see the go-fast boat’s sparkling engines, ended up attending the Great Lakes Boat Building School in Cedarville, Mich. She graduated in 2023 as one of three females in her class.
Today, Huffman is a technician level one at Boyne Boat Yard. In a span of a few days, she might service a boat with an oil change and pull fluids for testing. And work on ball joints for steering. “There’s so much variety with boats,” she says. “You have your engines, your steering systems, your head systems, electrical — it’s pretty much everything you would find on a boat. That’s why I like it.”
Looking forward, she’s trying to decide how to specialize. She says she still likes those gleaming high-performance machines, but she’s also considering HVAC systems because she’s seen a lot of job opportunities for people who know how to work on them.
She also says she sees the same thing that her older colleagues in the marine industry describe when it comes to a need for more engagement with promising younger people.
“There’s so many people aging out of it now, and so many young people that have just started — there’s not too many teaching spots in between,” Huffman says. “I got lucky where I’m at, to be trained by an awesome technician, but I know a lot of people don’t get that opportunity to start at the bottom and work up with another technician that is going to be with them for some of their career.”
Now that she’s in the industry, she says, she can definitely see a potential path for her future. “There will always be a need for people who work on boats,” Huffman says. “So far, so good.”
