Welcome To Stumpknocker Tours

Stumpknocker Tours

My name is Steve Hayes. I am a 35 year veteran of the Indian River County Fire District, recently retired. But, the story started in the late 1950's, when I was a young boy. My dad and a friend of his built a plywood airboat with a 65 hp Franklin airplane motor that took us to the marsh where we fished, hunted, and just enjoyed the outdoors. Later, they built a cabin in the middle of a cypress head where we would spend weekends playing in the marsh.

As I grew older and started driving, my brothers and my friends would wade out into the marsh to fish, hunt ducks and deer, and play tackle football. Oh, what fun we had in those days.

Then, in the mid 80's, I bought my first airboat. This is when my true love of the marsh began. It gave me the freedom to explore the places that you can only imagine, the sights that I wish that you could see, and the experiences that are to be had. About a year or two later, I built my second airboat which was bigger and much more powerful. This allowed me to run in the marshes from Loxahatchee, northwest of Ft. Lauderdale, to SR520, west of Cocoa, and from Lake Okeechobee to Lake Toho in the Kissimmee River. Sometimes, especially in the summertime, I would go someplace that I had never been, launch my airboat late in the afternoon, fish until dark, and go froggin' till the sun came up. Miraculously, I never got lost. Temporarily disoriented, but never lost.

In 1993, I started a part-time business making life-size, outdoor Christmas decorations. The really good thing about this business was that all of my work had to be done before Thanksgiving, the opening of duck season. One day during my second year of operation, I got the bright idea of guiding other people to the marsh to hunt ducks. I quickly hung out a shingle and became a part-time guide with a part-time business that had a full-time job with the fire department. After about five years of making Christmas decorations and not making any money, I decided to sell the business, get my Coast Guard Captains License, build a flats boat, and become a guide on my days off. Figured that if I couldn't make any money at it, then I might as well enjoy what I was doing. So, I fished from February till late November, hunted ducks from Thanksgiving thru January. This was the start of my professional guiding career. As more and more people duck hunted with me, some of the local clients in the citrus industry asked me if I could take some of their Japanese and European buyers for an airboat ride. The answer was "of course", and the airboat ride business began.

By the year 2000, duck hunting in this area declined to the point that it was not productive enough to insure duck hunters a quality hunt every time. So, I dropped it from the program. In the latter part of 2004, I sold my old airboat that had served me for almost 20 years and in January 2005, I went to Omaha, Nebraska to buy a larger one that was more readily suited to giving airboat rides. This boat served me for another two and a half years. In August of 2007, I took delivery of a new 22' Diamondback Airboat that was custom built for Stumpknocker Tours. This is, by far, the best decision of my guiding career. Besides being larger, safer, more comfortable, and a better ride, it also has aircraft style talk-around headsets that enable me to point out the gators, birds and flora and tell some stories about the marsh while we are underway.

One of the great joys in my life is taking people to the marsh, telling some of the old tales, seeing the wildlife, and watching them enjoy the experience.