I stopped in at Willams Fabricators to find out more about the company and was able to arrange an interview with Dale Williams. We met in his office.

Mr. Williams was born and raised in Fowl River, Alabama. His parents were commercial fishermen and when the seafood industry was slack, his father took various jobs in the shipyards. He discusses growing up around wooden boat builders and his entry into the industry at the age of 18 in 1969 with a shipfitting apprenticeship with Ingalls Shipyard. During his seven years with Ingalls, he learned many different skills and, importantly, had the opportunity to learn about mold lofts and become interested in design. He was laid off in 1976 and for the next 15 years worked a variety of jobs and even opened several businesses, before going back to work for Ingalls in the early 1990s in their engineering department. He quit that job and a few years later in 1998 reopened Williams Fabricators in which he built new boats (mostly fishing vessels) and developed a new framing system. At the time of the interview, they were getting into conversion work and he discusses repair work in general and plans to slowly grow and diversify. In terms of industry cycles, he says they are very difficult to predict and during down cycles (such as the one they were in at the time of the interview) you just have to live with the given situation, hope the quality of your work gets you through, and maybe diversify a bit. As a small yard, when they are busy they subcontract out a lot of the different skilled crafts, though when business is slower they do more in-house. Towards the end of the interview, he describes optical lofting and the use of computers in design work, and goes through the process from order, design, build, and testing. The gratifying part of the job is seeing the boats that they are able to make operational. The hard part is dealing with rising prices of materials.