deAndrade family on even keel for 40 years

ELIZABETHTOWN – From an ancestry that came from the sea and the coast of Portugal, White Lake Marine’s owners Carl (Carlos) deAndrade, Dianne deAndrade and their son, David deAndrade are celebrating their 40^th year in business with their anniversary date in September.

The business itself has been a familiar boat dealership in White Lake for 70 years selling Correct Craft with the deAndrades having taken over in 1985. Another milestone this year is Correct Craft’s Centennial Celebration.

Correct Craft founded the Correct Craft in 1925 as the Florida Variety Boat Company and they were well-known as talented boat makers that included powerboats, race boats and sailboats. After just over a decade, the demand for the popular powerboats. From an early advertisement that said, “the correct heel for your shoe” caused Meloon to create the correct craft for potential customers. The name was then changed to “Correct Craft.”

It’s an interesting story of how their story has developed to get them where they are today.

“My mom and dad bought the business 40 years ago,” David deAndrade said. “When I took over it was a transition as my parents began stepping back bit by bit. I began to assume more (responsibility). Dad will probably keep his hand on the business and stay on as long as he can.”

David deAndrade was born in Charleston, West Virginia.

“Dad was born in the Azores and then his family emigrated when he was eight or 9 years old to Boston and the family settled in the Somerville, Massachusetts area. He joined the military which is how he met my mom. She was a school teacher in Goldsboro.”

He began his career in chemical engineering with Union Carbide Corporation. When UCC decided not to do any further manufacturing in the United States and presented deAndrade with international travel, both the deAndrades reflected on their life and decided to make a change. They knew they wanted to relocated to Southeastern North Carolina where Dianne was from. They began to look to purchase a campground because of their love of camping.

“At that time a real estate agent called, and lo and behold he said, ‘we’ve got a marina for sale,’” David deAndrade said. “And I don’t know what went through his mind, but knowing dad, he thought perhaps that would be an interesting job, and he left the corporate life and settled here in 1985.”

Carl and Dianne deAndrade were the third owners of the property according to David deAndrade. The deAndrade family bought the business from Dave Cross who purchased it from Ray Beasley and he bought it from the first owner, Junior Evans who hung out his shingle in 1925.

Although it was originally called the White Lake Marina, but when the family expanded and moved their showroom and boat storage to the east of U.S. 701 Highway and off the shore of White Lake, Carl deAndrade tweaked the name and called it White Lake Marine.

“At some point, dad kind of just… changed that last letter,” said David deAndrade.

White Lake Marine is located on White Lake which has become a booming tourist town and an advantageous area to live year-round. It is the oldest Correct Craft dealership in the world selling boats by the top-end and legendary boat makers of Nautique for 70 years.

The company has evolved with the boat industry and has managed to make a niche’ in the world boat selling market. Once a large seller of outboard motor boats, they have a “unique specialty” in the inboard boat market and stock a large selection of preowned inboards for sale. The also sell inboards on consignment and used boats that they have taken in on trade.

The dealership is more than a “full service” operation with little to no competition in this area from other boat dealers. They do full service on Pleasurecraft Marine Engines and is an Indmar Inboard service center. They stock a full line of Correct Craft parts, Fashion Nautique and PCM parts that can be shipped anywhere in North America.

One of the exclusive features and part of the “extra mile” this company goes is if a customer likes a boat and wants to try it out – but they are hundreds of miles away, WLM will transport the boat to the customer’s location for a “test drive.”

In 2007 WLM became an authorized Moomba Performance Ski and Wakeboard Boats dealer for the Eastern North Carolina Market and for Dillon & Horry counties in South Carolina. Then in 2024 they have added the Montara line of surf boats. They also provide on-site mobile service and pickup/delivery for Nautique and Moomba owners in their market areas.

They are known worldwide and have become a respected boat dealer. And this huge business is conducted from the small community of White Lake where the family never regrets making the move to this area.

“Over time I’ve really appreciated the small-town community, knowing the neighbors, knowing the other businesses as well,” David deAndrade said. “I’m very thankful that we’ve been blessed to stay here and are able to maintain our customers who are not in this area. Here in our business, we store boats for customers over the winter and actually shrink-wrap them. Then the companion piece to us is our marina operations which we actually lease out and they have a year-round storage as well for people’s boats. In the spring, when the shrink-wrap comes off, we clean it up and take the boats to their slips.”

David deAndrade who grew up working in his parent’s business graduated from Harrells Christian Academy.

“Going to the smaller high school I feel that I had a deeper and better relationship with the faculty and just feel inclined to mention Mr. William C. Moss,” he said. “He was my math teacher; headmaster and it was proof that I grew up in a nurtured environment where with teachers who chose to drive to the middle of nowhere to perform a calling.”

deAndrade said that his faith played hugely into his life and into his business today.

“Life is truly a journey,” he said. “And I’m blessed to still have my parents around. When you’re young you think you know everything. As time grows on, I had a dad keeping me in line and teaching me. Growing in faith and growing in relationship with the Lord – it changed my demeanor and changed my outlook. Yes, the businesses need to make money, but the goal of the business is the ministry. I’m glad we’re family owned and not a corporation driven solely by the bottom line. Certainly, we have to make money to stay in business, but it has a different air to it when you look at what does your business allow you to do in ministry.”

He said that his favorite part of being part of a boat business is that every day is different.

“There is always something new that industry has changed,” he said. “By leaps and bounds since dad bought it. And it has really changed in the past 10 years. So, there’s always a learning process. Especially buyers have changed. We’ve had to adapt. At one time, if a boat was broken down, the mentality was – well, bring it in and we’ll get to it when we can. And now as the adaptation has reached our Nautique market, that is a very affluent buyer; these boats have really gone up in price. Our mentality now is, ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a problem, we’ll send our driver out to pick the boat up and bring it back.”

They won’t say it in so many words, but Carl and Dianne deAndrade have given a great portion of their lives to their business and making sure that the legacy they’ve created goes on.

“I was born on an island in the Azores,” Carl deAndrade said. “It’s on the Atlantic Ocean about 900 miles off the coast of Portugal. When I was 10 years old, we came to the U.S.”

Growing up in the Azores was quite an adventure back in the days when he was raised there. While Portugal maintained neutrality in the ‘40s, the Allied forces used the Azores as an important strategic location, influencing daily life through the establishment of airfields and the presence of foreign military personnel. Dairy farming, agriculture, and fishing were important economic sectors. Today the Azores offer a diverse range of activities, from exploring volcanic landscapes and enjoying natural hot springs to whale watching and hiking. Popular activities include visiting the Sete Cidades volcanic crater, relaxing in geothermal hot springs like Furnas, whale and dolphin watching, and hiking to waterfalls like Salto do Prego.

But that was another life and one that deAndrade moved away from with his family but perhaps the adventurer still remained. They moved to Somerville, Massachusetts where he lived until after he graduated from Northeastern University in Boston where he earned his degree in chemical engineering. After which he went to work as an associate director of engineering at Union Carbide Corporation and worked with that company in Charleston, West Virginia.

“Through college which was during the Vietnam War, I went through R.O.T.C.,” he said. “I did that to avoid being drafted until I finished my degree. And then I had to serve two years after I graduated. After six months with Union Carbide, I was called up to the military and after training at a few different bases, I ended up a first lieutenant at Fort Bragg (Fayetteville, North Carolina). I lived in an apartment with a few other Army buddies and next door was an apartment full of teachers and that’s how I met my wife.”

Dianne Underwood was teaching elementary school at Fayetteville at the time she met Carl and stayed with elementary teaching her entire career.

“After my military tour was over, I went back to work at Union Carbide and newly married we relocated to West Virginia,” he said.

The couple just had their 55^th wedding anniversary April 5.

“I worked for Union Carbide until 1985 and I traveled a lot including a three-year stint in Canada where we built a chemical plant for Prestone Antifreeze in western Canada. I then came back to the technical center in West Virginia. The next assignments were going to be like in Bangladesh and other weird countries because we weren’t building anything in the U.S. anymore at that time.”

After the decision NOT to move overseas anymore, the couple decided that they needed a career change. After months of looking to perhaps purchase a campground with no luck, the commercial Realtor they hired asked if they would have any interest in purchasing a marina.

“I didn’t like our option to go overseas,” said Dianne deAndrade. “We had a young son, so it was not something we even wanted to consider. Right before then, he was supposed to go to Bo Paul, India, and he was packed to go, but then the plant blew up.”

Union Carbide was able to weather the storm for a while, but eventually got swallowed up by Dow Chemical.

“After some research, we thought that this may have some potential,” he said. “The owner that time ran a seasonal business, and not many boats were being sold. I thought, well, maybe if we do this year-round, we might succeed.”

And they changed the dynamic of the little seasonal boat dealership going on to do a lot of boat shows, staying open all year around, advertising and promoting. At the time there were 11 Nautique dealerships in the state. They’ve since whittled it down to two – WLM and one in western North Carolina.

“We continued to expand while other dealers fell by the wayside,” he said. “We were pretty successful in expanding it from a minor dealership to a major dealership. All we bought initially was the marina side and then in 1988 we bought this property which was open land. All of the boat sales were there and the repair shop too. So, everything was that little congested area. To expand we had to separate the boat dealership from the marina.”

They again rolled up their sleeves and built the service building and by 1992-93 they completely separated the two properties. Boat sales and service had become a new entity just across the highway. And that’s when the name change occurred.

“We decided in 1990 was that we were expanding so much with the boat sales we couldn’t handle the people coming into the marina in the summertime. So, we decided to lease the operation of the marina to a third party. Since 1990 the marina has been leased out.”

The couple came from a chemical engineering background and a teaching background and literally knew nothing about the boat business when they took over, but they really are a couple that welcomes challenges and smiles at the adventure.

“I had a boat, got up a few times on skis, but didn’t really know how,” Dianne deAndrade said. “But I learned how to sell a lot of boats. The secret is that you sell yourself. I gave up selling hot dogs and started selling boats. The days when we first got here, we were selling hot dogs for the first five years.”

“When we leased out the marina and we came over here, she went full time with the boat sales,” he said. “At one time, for a couple of years, she was the biggest selling Nautique salesperson in the country. I still have a lot of customers who want to come in and talk to me.”

Their “young son” is now 48 years of age, has two sons and an incredible wife. He is the heir apparent to a credible and well-respected boat dealership in an obscure part of North Carolina. And when you look and listen to him speak, he is humble and points out that it was due to his mentors – his mom and dad. And he watched a story of two people that didn’t know anything about boats, but built a boat dynasty because they knew something about common sense and hard work.

As far as the many changes that have come in the past 40 years, deAndrade said that the internet was good for them. What it also does is take away the number of sales that they used to see at a boat show. They still do boat shows, but they’ve reduced the number of boat shows which shows a trend to work smarter and not harder – knowing that the sales field has changed. One of their bigger boat shows that still yields some good sales and leads is the Raleigh Boat Show at the convention center each year. They say that one of the biggest changes since they acquired the boat dealership was the fact that most of their sales first came from the White Lake Area and now most of the sales are from all over the world.

One of the surprises that Carl and Dianne had recently experienced was that their son, David found a vintage 1955 Nautique in incredible condition and now sits in their showroom. As incredible as that story is, another White Lake Marine miracle story was finding a 1957 Nautique that was actually sold in the WLM showroom, purchased by a Dr. Abernathy. That boat is still awaiting restoration.

At some point, Carl and Dianne will pull back, but show no signs of slowing down. They are hoping that perhaps with David at the helm and then one or both of his sons would join the mix and keep the family business and the legacy alive for future generations.

David and his wife Marcia who is a nurse have two boys who both graduated from Harrells Academy. Will who has recently finished his masters in accounting from UNC and has just passed the first part of his CPA exam. The youngest, Josh is 20 and just finished his first year at NC State with an engineering path and has been a licensed pilot for two years. He is helping us out here this summer and he loves how things work.

“We wanted to make sure that both the boys had time to find themselves,” he said. “Would love to have them come back and as Will is getting older and getting married in April of next year and asked if he could come back. It shocked me. As for Josh, I know I am ‘dad’ but he has been working in the shop and has such a natural at repairing and has that mechanical aptitude.”

The elders have backed off to the point where they rarely even come into the business, but still work from home – especially in the part of the business that is the technical support and e-commerce website. (nautiqueparts.com) That, in fact is their biggest business now over boat sales, according to Carl deAndrade.

“In 2008 there was a big downturn in the economy,” he said. “It hit the recreational industry bad. Boat sales just dropped like a rock. So, we sat down and tried to figure out another income stream. Because we are the oldest continuously operating Nautique dealership in the world – we’d get phone calls and emails from all over the country. They had questions about old boats and how to get parts that their dealer can’t get. We were selling some items by mail by virtue of these people calling. We then started putting some parts on our website. In 2008 we decided to go full-blown into the parts business. By that I mean that we would stock everything that is available or can be manufactured for Nautique boats. We spent over a year lining that up and in 2010 we went live. It started with a bang and has become pretty big.”

Another example of success coming from the ability to evolve, adapt and think outside of the box.

“I think the focus of what we do is not selling boats, but we are selling family fun,” he said. “And now we are selling that to the children and in some cases the grandchildren of those who first came to us. It’s a business that, by nature if you look at it that way, is designed to help people have fun.”

The store is open Tuesday – Friday: 9 a.m. – 5 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. – 2 p.m. and they are closed Sunday and Monday. To reach them, please visit them at 6485 US Hwy 701 North in White Lake, North Carolina or give them a call at 910-862-3688.