Growing pains at Killarney boat shop

KILLARNEY – A local boat shop saw its best year in 2025, however that wasn’t always a good thing for the man and wife behind the operation.

Killarney Lake Boat Works, which recently erected a storefront off Highway 18 in town, serviced roughly 100 boats this year, owner Tyler Pongracz told the Sun. The pace was great to see for the new company, but it was also troublesome in some respects at home.

“He’d leave at six in the morning, he’d come home at five o’clock for a quick dinner, then I wouldn’t see him for the rest of the night,” said Amanda Pongracz as she held the couple’s three-month-old daughter. “The last two years have been tough.”

Amanda and Tyler Pongracz have worked since 2019 to get their hobby boat repair, maintenance and restoration business established in Killarney. The shop had an ironic problem this year — it was too busy — and it led to a breaking point.

It was 2 a.m., and Amanda was seven-months pregnant. The mother awoke with cramps and wanted to go to the hospital immediately. She called around for Tyler. Where was he? After some searching, the mother realized her husband was at the boat shop catching up on work in the middle of the night. When Tyler rushed home to take her to the Brandon hospital, he appeared so exhausted that she didn’t trust they’d make it to town safely.

“I think it was an eye-opener for Tyler that he has to put up boundaries in terms of what he’s doing at the shop,” she said.

While the scare turned out to be okay, it put a pin in a problem that had been growing for some time.

When you’re trying to get off the ground, and business calls, you take the work and you try to do it as quickly as possible.

“This business is based on being available and being the guy who can help people,” he said. “I find balancing personal life and the business is hard.”

“Starting the business has definitely created issues and we’re working through them,” his wife said.

Tyler hopes he can make boats a profession if he leaves the army after more than two decades of service. The 38-year-old has a vision that hearkens back to his childhood, working on a marina that his father helped manage in Ontario.

As he approaches a time in his life where he may look to make a switch, it is very important to get the boat business up and running.

Tyler said he plans to try and open a marina at Killarney lake in the next five years. The marina would have roughly 20 to 40 spots, a workshop and a place to sell gas. He has begun to speak with interested locals who may support the project.

The business kept him so busy this year, the couple didn’t get their antique wooden boat on the water. The boat, a 1961 Chris Craft double cabin flybridge cruiser, is the same model that Tyler’s father had in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A picture of that model is framed in his home and another in the cabin of his boat which he is restoring.

“Some guys grew up riding bikes in the neighbourhood, I grew up around boats,” he said. “My dad had been doing boats since the 1970s. And so everything I learned from my dad and, what I’ll call, his toxic employees.”

The skillset for maintaining, repairing and restoring wooden boats is getting rarer as the years go on. The Killarney boat shop owner spends a lot of time to self-study, he said, and wants to keep that trade alive in his shop.

The problem, which caused him an overload of work this year, is that he is struggling to find staff — so he spends hours in the shop to get work done and keep customers happy.

Following the early morning when the father was too exhausted to bring his wife to Brandon, the couple saw the need for a re-examination of how to go forward. The work at the business needs to be negotiated with the maintenance of a family.

“We sat down and we discussed, ‘Okay, what time should I be at the shop till?’” Tyler said — the answer was 9 p.m. “We have discussed a lot in the business going forward into 2026, what we are going to do.”

“You have to manage your expectations on things. Certain things take priority in your life. You know, my family, and being in the army.”

Besides their three-month-old daughter, the couple has a 10-year-old son to care for.

Josh Nicholson, a recent graduate in Killarney, is one prospect in the area that has been convinced to get on the staff roll. He told the Sun that before he started working at the boat shop, Tyler was, as he put it, “trying to get me for a while.” The young man now works casually on weekends in his spare time.

“I like the hands-on work,” he said, after getting down from a ladder underneath the hull of the 14,000-pound Chris Craft. “Anything where you are sitting by, you kind of go crazy a bit.”

Nicholson helped restore a large section of the Chris Craft’s hull this year already. Once they are finished on the hull, the cabin carpets will be replaced, paint will be needed and some work will be required on the port engine.

Amanda told the Sun she thinks that her husband carries fond memories of marinas and boating because he associates boats to the idea of a complete picture, something he experienced as a kid before his family split apart.

“He’s just got a lot of good memories of boating with his family,” she said. “When I met Tyler we moved in together on his parents’ farm property, and there was two big wooden boats sitting there.”

Framed in their living room is a photo of one boat, a 1961 Chris Craft, the same model that his father had during his childhood. Tyler bought the same boat in the late 2000s, and commits a lot of time and money to keep it alive.

Customers come from many places — a boat he restored went to the Kootenays in British Columbia recently; some come from the United States. But there is one thing in common, he said, which has nothing to do with the material of the boat, whether its fibreglass or wood.

“The reason I like this business is I see a lot of people are working class families getting their first boat,” he said. “I would say there is nothing more family than boating.”

»cmcdowell@brandonsun.com