Archives

In a little more than a year, seriousoffshore.com has grown from a fledgling website started by high-performance boat enthusiasts Chris Sunkin, Craig Hall, Ted Ginnity and Nick Kamenszky to the strongest high-performance marine site in existence. Driven primarily by compelling message boards, seriousoffshore.com has become the place for intelligent, civil discussion on every conceivable subject in the go-fast boating world.

That’s because so many of the site’s members are more than enthusiasts. Many of them work, or have worked, in the high-performance powerboat world and are experts in their fields. In short, seriousoffshore.com has the kind of resources it takes to grow from being an outstanding forum for discussion to a broader—and equally outstanding—online editorial product.

“The members we have on this board—we couldn’t possibly pay them enough for their talent, expertise and knowledge,” Sunkin told me earlier today. “And they are generous enough to want to share all of it.”

To that end, Sunkin said seriousoffshore.com will expand its editorial offerings in 2010. While the form of that expansion is far from final, it likely will include daily and weekly blogs, interactive online features, exclusive video segments and a real-time, technical “question-and-answer” section. And those are just a few of the ideas Sunkin and his team are working on.

Do I believe in the future of seriousoffshore.com? Absolutely—so much for that I have agreed to work with principals in an editorial capacity, from helping new blog writers “find their voices” to creating original content.

I love to finish the week with good news. And the future of seriousoffshore.com is very good news.

It's no secret that Los Angeles Boat Show attendance has fallen off in recent years. That's a shame, because there are bargains, especially in the West Coast custom boat and aftermarket products realms, to be found there. Every major West Coast custom boat builder and parts supplier such as CP Performance, as well as major high-performance engine builders including Ilmor Marine, Mercury Racing and Teague Custom Marine displays at the L.A. Show.

So I have to take my hat off to CP Performance for offering free tickets to the 2010 L.A. event, which will be held Feb. 18-21 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, with every $50 purchase. To be frank, it's not exactly hard to drop 50 bucks on aftermarket parts so I expect that CP Performance, which is based in Rohnert Park, Calif., and is reportedly the world's largest retailer of aftermarket powerboat parts, will give away a lot of tickets. A whole lot of tickets.

You could say the giveaway is self-promotional for CP Performance and you wouldn't be wrong (just cynical and short-sighted), but show me a "giveaway" that isn't self promotional. Frankly, I applaud any effort to keep the West Coast's largest boat show alive and well, and I applaud CP for the ticket giveaway.

You know something is a guilty pleasure if you feel, well, seriously guilty for enjoying it. That makes Freeze Frame Video’s, “They Swam Away 1” and “They Swam Away 2” DVDs the epitome of guilty pleasures—at least for me. Having just spent the better part of two hours watching both of these DVDs, which consist of nothing more than offshore raceboats crashing to the beat of rock music—with some gratuitous bikini babe footage tossed in for good measure—I have sentiments ranging from, “OK, that was really, really cool” to “What the hell is wrong with me?”

Yet another sure sign of a guilty pleasure—mixed emotions.

What makes it all work is that, according to Freeze Frame’s Jeff Gerardi, no one in any of these nasty raceboat crashes gets seriously hurt. If that were the case, both DVDs would be seriously uncool and there really would be something wrong with me or anyone else who enjoyed them.

It’s hard to believe as you watch guys get spit out of one open-cockpit boat after the next, horrendous flips, roll-overs and violent stuffs that no one involved sustains serious injury. But that’s what Gerardi told me again and again earlier today—because I asked him again and again. I have no reason to disbelieve him.

And there are some memorable crashes on these videos including the Pier 57 catamaran getting absolutely blind-sided by the No. 92 catamaran that seemed to flat-out miss the turn during the 2002 Miami Superboat Grand Prix, and a from-the-waterline view of Steve Schuble (the founder of Offshoreonly.com) and company getting knocked into the water by a raceboat that plowed into their safety boat during the APBA Offshore National Championships in St. Petersburg, Fla.

It could have been worse. I could have watched the season-opener of “American Idol.” Now that’s a guilty

Got a great phone call from Eric Colby, my friend and former editor at Powerboat magazine. Colby, who used to write The Boat Doctor column—and did a consistently great job with it—for Boating magazine, had just gotten off the phone with Mike Horak, the powertrain director for the Brunswick Boat Group. Both Colby and Horak were concerned about the recent rash of freezing and below-freezing temperatures in the South—the low in Bradenton, Fla., for example, was 28 degrees yesterday—and the effect those temperatures could have on marine engines that weren’t winterized.

Generally speaking, winterizing marine engines isn’t standard operating procedure for powerboat owners south of the Carolinas. But weather conditions in the South of late have been anything but standard.

“If there’s a bunch of water sitting in your block, you could have issues,” said Colby. “You know what happens when water freezes—it expands. You could be facing the potential problem of a cracked block. You could have problems with your exhaust manifolds.”

Despite that temperatures are predicted to rise in the South as the week progresses, boat owners who want to err on the side of caution should winterize their engines, at least for the short-term.

“The main thing is to get the water out of your engine,” said Colby. “Pull the drain plugs and the drain hoses. If you put in some type of anti-freeze, you’ll want to use propylene glycol.”

What’s the worst thing that could happen if winterizing proves unnecessary? You trade off minimal effort for substantial peace of mind.

The naysayers came out in force when Cigarette Racing Team introduced its 39 Top Fish center-console model several years back. It wasn’t a real fishing or dive boat. It couldn’t compete with the likes of Midnight Express, Yellowfin and Contender. It was too expensive.

Turns out that Skip Braver, the owner and CEO of the Opa-Locka, Fla., company, could not have made a better move. Since the day it was added to the Cigarette line, the 39 Top Fish has been a strong seller. It’s an unquestionable success.

Now the company has introduced a “military version” of its center-console 39 Top Fish. The no-frills, no-nonsense 39-footer features four Stidd shock-mitigating seats, which were originally designed for use by the U.S. Navy Seals, and a completely digital helm station. Power is provided by a trio of 300-hp Mercury Marine Verado outboard engines.

The military version of the 39 Top Fish will be on display at the 2010 Miami International Boat Show alongside the much-awaited Cigarette Mercedes AMG concept boat. (You can find more on the Cigarette AMG in an earlier post to this blog.)

Look for a complete story on the “militarized” 39 Top Fish in the next issue of Powerboat magazine, which also will be available at the Miami Show.

Catching up with Michigan-based graphics wizard Mitcher T earlier this week reminded me that I hadn’t spoken to guys at Sunsation Performance Boats in Algonac, Mich., in quite awhile. Last time we chatted was in spring 2009, and they were pumped up about their upcoming 36-foot-long stepped V-bottom But at that point, the boat was still on the drawing board.

Now it’s a reality—production on the first 36 Dominator begins next week.

“I have six units sold already—it’s amazing to have sales on something that doesn’t even exist yet,” Joe Shaldenbrand of Sunsation told me this morning. “All are staggered set-ups, and the first few are with (Mercury Racing) 525s.

“The 36 is a stretched version of our 32 rather than a down-sized version of our 43,” he added.

Creating tooling for the 36 Dominator, said Schaldenbrand, took less than three months. Noted offshore racer and high-performance powerboat driving school founder Tres Martin was involved in developing the model’s stepped hull.

Even with a staggered twin-engine configuration, the 36-footer’s cockpit is nine inches longer than that of the company’s popular 32 Dominator. Like the 32, the new model will be offered in the builder’s S, SS, SSR and XRT packages.

Schaldenbrand added that the 36 Dominator will cost approximately $40,000 more than Sunsation’s 32-footer.

“I am going to hold down the price,” he said. “We’re not trying to gouge anyone. We have so many customers who own 32s and would like to make the move a 43, but they just can’t afford it. But they can make the jump to the 36.”

Though Schaldenbrand said he had hoped to have the new model on display at the 2010 Miami International Boat Show in February, it won’t be completed in time for the event.

“But we’ll be there and we’ll have plenty of information on it,” he said.