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“ I ’ V E NEVER BUILT THE SAME BOAT TWICE,” CAISON SAYS. “EVERY ONE
I S DIFFERENT.”
A Caison 60 Flying Bridge Sportfish under construction at Caison Yachts in Hampstead. Donnie Caison, far right, speaks with clients at
his shop.
“I only have 3 feet of water and limited space,” Johnson says.
“I was determined to have a boat that would fit, but I wanted
to get the biggest boat I could. I kept hearing about this guy
Donnie Caison and seeing these big, beautiful boats that he was
building. Finally, I gave him a call one day. He looked and said,
‘You can easily get a 38-foot boat with a super shallow draft.’
He has this whole CAD/CAM system, so we sat down and
designed a boat together with tunnel hulls. The tunnels allow
you to get into shallow water.”
The process with Johnson is the same one Caison takes with
all his clients.
“I’ve never built the same boat twice,” Caison says. “Every
one is different. You get somebody like Richard who comes in,
his vision of what he wants and what he needs is completely dif-ferent
from what someone else wants and needs.”
There are similarities. Caison builds classically flared Carolina
hulls. His hulls are made of cold-molded wood sealed with
high-strength marine epoxy and covered with a protective skin
of fiberglass. Yet each is unique based on the owner’s choice of
size, power, style, and amenities like icemakers, freezers for bait,
live wells, touch-screen electronics and even refrigerated cup
holders on the bridge.
“Even if you know Carolina boats, the flare shape, there’s
minute differences,” Caison says. “My uniqueness is I not only
build them, but I design them. I model in 3D CAD. I can
build the hull, I can paint the hull, I can wire the boat. I don’t
count on anybody else. I have great people working for me and
I don’t have to do much more than design them now, but at
some stage of my career, I’ve done every aspect of this process.
I don’t know that there’s a lot of boat builders around that can
say that.”
Even after building the first boat, Caison didn’t really intend
to make a living at it. All he wanted to do was fish. Running
charters out of Dockside would have been enough. But people
began to notice his boat was something special. It would pass
bigger vessels on the way out and would be the first one back
after a day of fishing.
“I’d be all cleaned up and fueled up before they got back,” he
says.
He picked up a couple of jobs subcontracting to make hulls,
then built a 64-footer. He moved out of the shed and into the
old Bennett Brothers building in Porters Neck, then farther
north to the current boatyard in Hampstead.
Although he’s never taken a boat design course and doesn’t
have an engineering background, Caison has an analytical mind.
That’s the secret to combining craftsmanship with physics and
creating precise, balanced craft that slice through the water.
“It’s all by math,” he says. “You know where you’re going to
float based on the volume and weight of the hull. You don’t
have to do super advanced calculus equations. It’s very simple
formulas, and they are all readily available. You can find a
design manual at the library downtown and it’ll give you the
displacement formula that they’ve been using since the 1700s to
design sailing boats. It’s the same thing. It’s not new science.”
At first, the calculations were done by hand. Now, they are
done with software.
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WBM june 2017