10/14/2026
Every August, the narrow channels between the Les Cheneaux Islands near Hessel fill with wooden boats built as far back as the early 1900s, varnished hulls catching the light as they idle past docks lined with spectators. Nearly 150 antique and classic boats show up most years now, making it one of the largest gatherings of its kind anywhere in the country, and more than 300 volunteers keep the whole weekend running.
It started small, in 1978, with two seasonal residents and their own boats. Chuck Letts and Ken Horsburgh each owned an antique wooden boat and had a theory about why the Les Cheneaux area seemed to have more of them, in better shape, than anywhere else they had looked.
Here is what people get wrong.
The assumption is that a wooden boat show is really a restoration show, a place where owners haul out relics that spent decades rotting in a barn before somebody lovingly rebuilt them for display. That is not the story Letts and Horsburgh were telling when they founded this one. Their theory was the opposite. The cold water and short boating season in the Les Cheneaux Islands meant these wooden hulls were not getting the kind of heavy, season-long use and sun exposure that wore boats out faster in warmer parts of the country. A boat that only goes in the water for ten or twelve weeks a year ages differently than one running all summer long somewhere further south. So instead of being a graveyard for neglected boats, the Islands had quietly become a place where boats from the 1900s through the 1930s stayed in genuine, regular use well into the later twentieth century, because the climate was gentler on them.
Letts and Horsburgh brought their idea to the Les Cheneaux Chamber of Commerce and recruited 30 volunteers to put on that first show. The event has since passed into the hands of the Les Cheneaux Historical Association, which has run it for more than three decades. What began as a small gathering organized by two boat owners with a hunch about regional climate has grown into a weekend that draws collectors, owners, and spectators from well outside Michigan.
One stop along the route matters beyond the show itself. E.J. Mertaugh Boat Works sits at the eastern end of the event grounds and holds a specific piece of history in its own right: it was the first Chris-Craft dealership in the United States outside the company's own hometown of Algonac, Michigan. The dealership is not a museum piece either. It still operates today, selling and servicing the same kind of wooden runabouts the show celebrates every summer.
Now well past its 46th year, the show has outgrown its original scale many times over while keeping its original premise intact. These are not boats pulled out of storage for one weekend a year and then tucked away again. Plenty of them were built before the Second World War and have kept right on doing what they were built to do, carrying people across short, cold-water channels in a part of Michigan where the season is brief enough to let a wooden hull last.
That short season cuts both ways for an owner. A boat that only runs ten or twelve weeks a year needs the other forty spent in a heated shed, hauled, stripped, and re-varnished by hand before it ever touches the channel again. Volunteers and owners alike treat that offseason labor as part of the hobby rather than a chore attached to it, which is part of why a weekend built around two men's hunch in 1978 still has boats to show nearly fifty years later.
Here is what people get wrong.
Image generated with AI — the feeling is real.
