T H E LOVE O F FISHING
A
FRIEND CALLED and said come see this
amazing new boat. An offer to spend a
couple of hours out of
the office on a sunny spring day is too
good to pass up, so before long the
crew is flying down the Intracoastal
Waterway south from Wrightsville Marina.
The 38-foot sportfish with triple 300 hp Yamaha out-boards
is remarkably stable. It has a gyroscopic stabilizer
mounted beside the generator under the flooring where
the captain is standing. Called a Seakeeper, it eliminates
the roll of the boat from passing wake and waves.
It’s like the boat is floating on air — very stable, very
cool. It is not an amenity typically found on a boat this
size. But like most boats built by Donnie Caison, very
little on this craft is typical.
It all started with a love of fishing.
Caison was working as a general superintendent for a
contracting company, but his passion was spending time
on the water with a couple of lines out. Like most fisher-men,
he dreamed of bigger and better, something that
could take him far offshore to the best spots.
“I was helping a good friend of mine build a house on the
weekends,” he says. “We were talking about getting a big-ger
boat. We decided we were going to buy an old 31-foot
Bertram together and fix it up and make it like we wanted
it.”
They found a boat and Caison began crunching
numbers to see what it would cost to refit it the way he
wanted. The number was uncomfortably high.
“I said, ‘We don’t have $150,000 to spend on a 35-year-old
boat that ain’t worth but $50,000. For $150,000, I
bet I can build a boat,’” he says. “He doubted it, but I
said, ‘Just watch me.’”
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WBM june 2017