Keith Hennessy started Deckmasters in 2005 with a single crew and a straightforward premise: build marine structures on the Indian River Lagoon the way they should be built — permitted through every agency, engineered for what the water actually does, and constructed by people who understand the difference between a structure that lasts twenty years and one that lasts four. That first project was a residential dock in Vero Beach. The permit took eleven weeks. The dock is still there. Twenty-one years later, the firm holds the same Florida Registered General Contractor license, the same crew philosophy, and the same operating waterway. What has changed is the depth of the permit record and the number of communities where the work is standing.
About the Firm
Twenty-one years on one stretch of water.
Deckmasters Marine was founded in Vero Beach in 2005. The Indian River Lagoon has been the job site ever since.
The Indian River Lagoon shapes every decision we make.
The Indian River Lagoon is not a generic Florida waterway. It carries specific tidal patterns, manatee protection zones, seagrass beds, and FDEP Aquatic Preserve designations that change the engineering equation on every project. Pile spacing that works in open water works differently near a seagrass bed. Dock height requirements shift in manatee-season windows. Material choices that hold up in Gulf conditions are not the same as those that hold up against the lagoon's brackish salt mix and four-foot tide swing.
A contractor who has never navigated Indian River Lagoon permitting is not the same as one who has done it across forty projects in seven communities. The difference is not expertise in the abstract — it is the specific knowledge of which FDEP district reviewer handles Indian River County applications, which seagrass survey timing avoids re-review, and which Army Corps nationwide permit categories apply to which work types along this particular stretch of the Intracoastal. That knowledge is built over years on one waterway. We have been on this one for twenty-one.
85 combined years behind every project we touch.
The crew that arrives on your waterfront has, on average, been doing this work for more than a decade. The 85-year figure is not a marketing construct — it is the sum of the field experience represented by the people who drive the pile-driver, mix the marine concrete, and run the inspection walk-through at the end. Senior tradespeople here have watched hurricane seasons come and go, watched seawall designs that looked adequate fail in the second major storm, and made note of the differences.
Keith is on every project personally. Not in an oversight capacity from the office — on the water, reading the soil conditions, adjusting pile spacing when what is below the muck line differs from what the survey showed. The projects where things go wrong are almost always the ones where the principal stopped showing up. That is not this firm's operating model.
We do not grow by adding volume and thinning the supervision. We grow by taking on the right projects and seeing them through from the site walk to the permit close-out package. That limits the number of projects we carry at once. It does not limit the quality of any one of them.
Most marine contractors stop at build. We hold all four — design, engineering, permits, and the work itself.
Private clientele. Named communities. No volume bidding.
Deckmasters does not participate in competitive-bid processes for residential work. The clients who call are almost always referred by a neighbor, a property attorney, or a club staff member who has watched the firm's work on the water for years. That referral model is deliberate.
Volume contractors bid low to win, then manage margin through material substitution and schedule compression. That model does not produce the kind of work that earns the next referral in a community where neighbors talk. The only sustainable model, in this market, is one where each project is worth the firm's name being attached to it.
The communities where Deckmasters has worked — John's Island, Windsor, Orchid Island, The Moorings, Carlton Club, Quail Valley, Riomar — are places where the work is visible from other estates and from the water. The standard is not set by the contract. It is set by the neighborhood.
- Florida License
- Florida Registered General Contractor — Indian River County, Lic. RG291103858
- Insurance
- USL&H + Jones Act Marine. Certificate of insurance available within 24 hours.
- In Business Since
- Serving the community since 2005. Built for the Lagoon.
Start with a site visit.
Keith walks your waterfront, assesses the structure, and gives you a plain-language summary — before any proposal, before any commitment.