By Edward Lebow

Archives Reprint

   (Newport News) Daily Press

    ISLE OF WIGHT - Fish stories always begin with a fib about size.

    This fib is a beauty, all 54 wooden inches of it, clamped to the workbench of Isle of Wight woodcarver Tom Mayes Sr.

    In a twist on the usual tale, it's larger by several inches than the one that got away, said Roger Herring, a Virginia Beach real estate broker who commissioned Mayes to recreate a striped bass he caught and released several years ago. At 80, Mayes is known far beyond his Isle of Wight studio for carvings so detailed that his fish, fowl and other critters seem poised to swim or fly from his cavernous studio and into the world.

    "Nobody does it to his level of detail that I've ever seen," said Herring, who has known Mayes for years. "He did a croaker for a guy, and he counted all 2,700 scales. I told him he didn't have to go all out like that on my fish, because I knew how much time he puts into these things, but he told me if he can't do it right, he didn't want to do it."

    Mayes, who has been married for almost 58 years to his wife, Mildred, carves just about anything. His studio goes by the name Kuntry Kabin Custom Carving. The display cases in the cleaner half of his cavernous building are filled with carved rifle and pistol stocks, tooled leather, mantels, etched whale bone, model ships and pictures of the carved furniture he has made over the years.

    He once made a 15-foot sculpture of an ivory gull, or an arctic seagull with pure white plumage and black feet. That commission, back in the late 1980s, encouraged him to set up shop and turn his hobby into something more.

    "When I was working on that gull, I'd work from 6 in the morning until dark," he said. "I still like to get in a full eight hours."

    Stroking the head of Herring's fish, Mayes stooped to peer inside its open mouth, then fingered the cavity.

    "I've still got a lot of work to do in this area," he said as if to remind himself. "It's tupelo wood. I've already got about 900 hours in this."

    He said he could spend another 700 on it before it's ready to go. Herring's fish was just 48 inches long. That's slightly smaller than a record catch, but large enough to bring out the Captain Ahab in him.

    "When I got it hooked," Herring recalled, "I started screaming, 'It's Moby Dick.'"

    He said the fish was so full of roe that he didn't have the heart to keep her. So he photographed it before tossing it back and eventually brought the pictures to Mayes.

    "That's how I like to start if I don't have the real thing to work with," said Mayes, a retired naval architect at the Norfolk Navy Shipyard.

    He's also a Navy veteran who has the face, brawn, grip and tattooed forearm of a grandfatherly Popeye.

    His approach to his craft reflects his training as a ship designer. He meticulously carries his wooden forms from two to three dimensions as if he were still designing and building ships, filling sheets of paper with precise scale drawings of whatever he's making.

    Though he often begins with pictures, he sometimes relies on real examples of creatures to get the details right. Turkey, pheasant, goose and duck wings and feet hang from corkboards above his work tables, giving his walls the look of a museum of natural history.

    Books with close-up photographs of the birds, fish and other animals he likes to carve are never far from reach. His creations sell for prices ranging from a few hundred dollars to $10,000.

    "We paid $5,000 for a goose he made for us," said Clem Dalton, who lives not far away in Chuckatuck.

    Echoing the common raves about Mayes' precision, he praised the feathers and pose the woodcarver gave the Canada goose.

    "What's so unbelievable is the way he carved each one of the individual feathers, and he posed it with its head cocked as if he's looking in a particular direction. So it looks on guard. And it has one foot raised," he added.

    Dalton wanted the goose to look natural, he said. So Mayes drew up several variations of poses.

    "I like to work that way with people, get a sense of what they want then try to get the right feeling into it," Mayes said. "Your feelings are a big part of it. That's partly why I do this, and the fact that you can never really copy nature. That's the challenge of this. I'm always thinking about what to do next."

   AP-ES-06-01-04 0844E

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