Rebuilding A Hurricane Damaged Boat Into $100,000 Fishing Vessel!

In 2024, I decided it was time to purchase an offshore fishing vessel. And I found the perfect boat for me, a 2011 Sea Hunt Triton 225 with only 220 hours on the motor. Now, this boat was really set up more as a family boat, not for hardcore fishing. But I did have a vision for what this boat could be. It had a lot of things that needed to be fixed or changed, but most of the major things were cosmetic. The only problem was Hurricane Helen was barreling toward the Big Bend of Florida, which is where this boat was located. I went ahead and rolled the dice and made the deal for the new boat, not knowing if it was going to survive Hurricane Helen. So, after Hurricane Helen had passed, I started the trek down to the Big Bend. When I arrived, I was relieved to find out the boat had gone through with minimal damage. I felt really lucky after driving past dozens of boats stuck in the fields on the way there. I got her loaded up, brought her back home, and knew that this was something that I couldn't do on my own. So, I got a hold of Brent, the sonar man. Brent is in the Panama City Beach area, and he's been doing projects like this for years. We pretty much gutted it from end to end minus the motor and went back with a blank slate and put all new electronics, lighting, trolling motor, just about everything you can think of. So stay tuned. You're going to want to see this incredible transformation. Okay guys, batteries came in. So let's check them out. Excited. Amped Outdoors sent this to me. Oh man, so much lighter than a lead core. amped outdoors, deep cycle, 160 amp hour. How long do you think that trolling motor will run? 12 to maybe 16 hours of run time off of them. Awesome. Yeah. All right, guys. If you haven't met him yet, this is Brent. How y'all doing? The sonar man. He's the one heading up this whole project here. Let's hop up in and see what's going on and then uh see what's going to happen. All right, guys. As you can see the dash, it looks like a skeleton right now. We do have the the VHF radio in. So, one new if I can get the cover off. There we go. One new aspect. Got the Simrad VHF. You can see right here, this is Ingis battery management system. Uh you can look down in the bottom there. This is where all the batteries are going to go. Uh he's having boxes built and they're all going to fit into those boxes and then he can put a false floor on top of those so the space can still be utilized. You won't have to worry about setting stuff on top of the batteries on the far wall. That's where you're putting the PVC panel and Yes, sir. Okay. On the far wall, that's going to be kind of what do you what would you call that? Like a it's going to be our electronics panel basically. so that we can have everything zip tied down nice and neat and so that it's bolted to it and that everything's just uh tucked away out of the way. All right. And you can see back here, this is where the batteries were and all your battery switches and everything were right inside there inside the panel inside underneath the seat here. And all that's getting moved up to the console. And then this is where the charger was. You see all the lights are ready to install. pull all the wirings in for the lights. Getting new spreader lights. Um the overhead lights, we're going to just stick with those for now and uh maybe try and find some new covers for them. Well, we couldn't find any replacement covers for those overhead lights. So, I just took it upon myself, sanded them down, got some good marine quality paint, and repainted them. They look good as new now. And then when they go out, then we'll replace them. uh speakers ready to be installed. He's got the mount for the radar ready. We got a new antenna. Uh new 360 light. You can see that. That's a Lumat 360 light. It's up to two miles. Coast Guard approved. Back here, we're going to have the deep blue underwater lights on the back of the boat. The troll motor is going to be mounted up here on a swivel mount. Cswive. Cswive. Yes. Who Who makes that? Cswive is the manufacturer. Yeah, I'm excited about that. And it's a a Rodan uh 84 in 120 pound thrust. Getting ready to put in a bigger hatch. Yeah, because you won't be opening that very often anyway. Oh, but if you ever need to, you can remove this lid. It pops right off of there. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah. I just got to kind of get an idea on how just easier access to everything in there. All right, guys. So, uh, next time we come out, it'll be a lot more done. So, hope you're enjoying the video so far. If you are, don't forget to like and subscribe and go check out the Sonar Man on Facebook. I'll see you guys here in a few days. I would have to say that the dash rebuild was my favorite part of the transformation. The difference before and after is unbelievable. Hey, Bonnie. How are you? Good. Joe, around. So, I'm too. Oh, really? Okay. Nice to meet you, Sean. This is going to be your light cover. Oh, nice. I actually needed two of these, but I didn't tell him that. It's all good. But yeah, here's your new battery. This is mine, but yours going to be like that. And then here's your trolling motor batteries. Okay. Battery. This is your file right here. Everything that we've created is on file. Battery boxes. Yeah, it's this one. So, yeah, that bad boy right there. There's yours. She all the components. That's a work of art right there. So, let me tell you. So, he had to build everything and then basically see it on file so that he knew he could create it. Then there's all the pieces laid out. And then there's that actual side view of what it looks like from the side. Get something. Got it? No, I got it. I'm used to carrying 14 things in and 25 things. So, we headed back to Brent's shop to start polishing the edges on the dash covers. [Music] Getting smooth now. So, I always start out real slow and just work it in. All right, we just picked up those last few pieces for the dash panel and Brent's getting ready to get started here. So, what we did is we made a template first, pre-drilled our holes. We lined our holes up with the old ones from the old panel. And now we're getting these holes drilled out. So that way when we put our weld points in, we have a little bit of clearance to be able to take our panel and adjust it rather than just trying to stick it in there and it be super tight. Okay. So, all right. And now we'll clean off. Our next step is to clean off everything. Okay. And then with acetone. So, we'll go ahead and clean everything with acetone. prep. Make sure that everything fits one more time once it's clean. And then we'll seal the back side of it with our life seal. All right. Sweet. I'm going to get the hardware for the back side of it. Put our last one on. Now we'll tighten her down. I can't believe they got all that little detail in there. Oh, I know. Working on the uh Lawless Tide transducer installs. um the two B175s, one being a H and one being a low. And uh we're just doing the uh retrofit. Um we got the first hole done on the port side of the [Applause] vessel. Now we're about to do the starboard side. Just to give youall an idea of what we're looking at. There's the hole. It's a three and 3/4 inch hole. There's the one already done. So now we're about to get started on this one. All right. So now we got to go inside the village area cuz the dead rise in the village is like this a little bit high. So we got to bring the dead rise down so that way our mounting ring for the O-ring spacer and our washer I mean our nut all sit flush. Looking down at the BGE you can see what we're looking at. We're on transducer number two. This is the low frequency one. I'm putting the high on the right side, the low on the left side. Y'all, we got the transducers sealed in. There's the high and there's the low. There it is. Everything in the build finished, tightened up, hidden the way it needs to be, wires ran the way they need to be ran. All right, guys. We're here at West Marine in Panama City Beach. We are getting ready to go in uh here with Brent, the sonar man. We're going to go in and get a bunch more stuff for the boat build. So, let's go see what we got going. Um but yeah, this is I use the blue one on the uh on your boat right there. Oh, for the live well live. Yeah, that's sweet. Instead of using the cheap live well lights that are plastic that are just going to rust out like these. Sweet. So, that'll give me all the serious weather and Yeah. So, this will be the antenna part that plugs up on top of this of the roof and then this will be for the networking the net two box and then it'll power cord and then u this will go to our Nemo. Okay. Then you'll have your fish mapping now. Yeah. And you can have serious uh radio out there if you want to. Yeah. All right. So, we got the charger, we got the uh the build pump, the cage, the net two is ordered, we got the GS25. We're going to get the drain plugs and the cup holders from Boat Outfitters. We can get the cooler slide. And then the cup rod holders we're going to get from Gen Lux along with the hinges and the D and the S latch. Okay, sweet. That's fine. Perfect. You just have to add that to your account, but Okay, that's totally up to you. Okay. So, showing our man. All right. Got it all. Everything's ready. All the goodies. We'll just uh black out that receipt so Michelle doesn't see the price. We're taking a swivel mount gym lux rod holder zero degree. This is going to get mounted right here but upside down this way and go down into the vessel. That's going to be our access port. But eventually he decides to put a speaker in there. He could put a 10-in speaker in there. This would go down and that would go down there like that. Hey, we have another bottle of white up there. Will you grab it, please? the Gymlux zero degree swivel rod holders. Okay. Then we put in these cup Gym Lux rod holders right here on the back. Pretty. I don't know if you guys have seen them, but they make some really good products. All right, guys. I know you've seen the motor all beat up back here. I don't know how it happened, but everything inside looks great, but this kind of this looks crappy. And uh I was going to try and like sand it and repaint it, but luckily uh the mechanic that's doing all of my maintenance on the motor for me, Sean from uh Panama Marine, uh he saw that and he's like, "You need one of those?" I was like, "Well, yeah, that'd be awesome." So, he made a quick call and uh they got a spare one at uh Kramer Marine and Outdoor. And so, now I'm going to have a new cover. I'm not going to have to paint that. I'm going to go pick that up here in a little while. And uh so, thanks, Sean. Yes. So, that's awesome. And let's go into the console. Console's finished. What we did is to mount this fire extinguisher right here. This console used to be there where those three screw holes are. So, we dropped it to the bottom three screw holes and moved it downward so that way we could fit that. There's our custom battery battery box right there. Battery box. Jeez, that needs to go on the bloopers. Um, it's holding the tri uh the trolling motor. Wow. Um, three batteries and then it's holding the boat batteries. It's got one for the motor and one for the starting. And that's ran through our Ingus battery management system right there. This is the motor. This is a dual ACR for both batteries. And then this is your start or this is your electronics, your house, your feed. Then we got a wet sounds amp, serious weather module, our house charger, trolling motor charger, S5100 amplifier, and our net 2 network box. Got our VHF up there. Simrad NSX 3015 UW. That's 3015 UW ultra wide. All right. And then we got our dash panel with our Yamaha gauge, our CL5 gauge, replaced all the analog gauges on the system, rewired everything, cleaned up all the wiring on the console form, and we installed this killer dash right here. Custom logo engraved, the Lawless Todd. Got the unit. It's not a reverse mount because you can't reverse mount these units, but it's a recessed mount with that Fusion radio. And there you go, ladies and gentlemen. Your underwater lights. So, we did a whole lot on this boat. All right, y'all. This is the live well lid. We're polishing the edges just like we do on the black acrylic. Same thing. Just to show you guys the steps. You're going to start with 320, 400, 600, end with 1,000, and then you're going to polish out. All right, y'all. I uh am bolting down the hinge, the gym lock hinges, their friction hinges, so the lid lifts up and down and stays in place where you want it to. And uh we're getting the last one done right now. Just wanted to go over this with y'all. All right. So, last one's tightened down. That's how your lid will stay. That's how your lid will close. It will latch down and stay locked once I install my latch. And right now we're doing the honors of removing this final piece. It's not complete yet, but give you an idea. That's what it looks like. Functioning as it should. Let me give all the credit where credit's due. South Carve that guy Chris Clifton. Amazing work. Custom live welded Gym Lux friction hinges. Gym Lux slam latch. It's done. We're uh we're down to the last thing and that's these new seats that he talked about on the Destin fishing report that we're making and got rid of the old seats that were there. We fiberglassed all that stuff up. So ladies and gentlemen, we're getting to be a wrap and we got wash down. Yeah, that looks better than that ugly burnt orange. Yes. Don't know why they ever even went with that. Wow. That made a big difference. Huge. So, all right, guys. Brent's going to go over real quick. This is the last step. It is last thing we got going. So, once this is done, it's ready to rock and roll. But, uh, they're finishing up the, uh, custom seat that we're doing here to replace the cushions. If you didn't see earlier, the cushions were just in disrepair. There was no way to fix these. It was going to have to be replaced somehow. So, we had to take off all the hinges, all the hardware, take out all the screws, and you can see it left a lot of damaged fiberglass that had to be fixed. Still a little bit of holes, so that way I got some more room for my filler. But I'm going to come through and I'm going to go ahead and fill all of them and get them level and then we'll slightly sand them back down again and then we'll gel coat. So, I'm about to get started on the starboard side and I'm going to let you guys see it. So, there's the areas. So again, you got screw holes that were all along here. Multiples, screw holes all along there. This is the starboard side. Show you the port side. Me and Sean were talking. He decided he didn't want to go back with the cushion seats to where he can step on them and damage the cushions. and this being a fishing vessel. U so we thought about using one inch starboard as maybe like a a lid, a fiberglass lid would be acting as a lid, but at the same time it could be used as a seat. But I also like how the boat outfitters doors come out and they come all the way out of the compartment. And so we came up with lids, seat lids that would slam latch down and you can take your two slam latches right here and remove the whole entire lid to be able to get into the compartment or work on it or anything like that. We're going to be hogging out this raised lip area right here so that our 1-in starboard sits flush down on the fiberglass. I'm going to make it wider than what this area is so that it doesn't damage any of the fiberglass. Also, these are the little tweaks that we have to make to our final adjustments for the outside so that it sits perfectly in there. And then once we get back our next set of templates for this, which will be our fourth ones, we'll go ahead and we should be really close to being able to have our outer perimeter done. So then the only thing we'll have left to do is to test our inside perimeter for the hog out on the 1 in starboard. But that's it. That's going to be something custom that's I don't know that has been done um a lot, but it's possible it's probably been done before. Yeah, that's going to save a lot of wear and tear, too. And I priced getting the upholstery fixed. Oh, you did? Yeah. Were you shocked? Oh, it was ridiculous. So, here's the before and after with the seats. It's a pretty amazing transformation, but in the walkthrough, I'll show you more. All right, guys. We're here with Frank from Safe Floor, Alabama. How's it going? Uh, we're getting ready. We're dropping the boat off. Uh, it's going to look completely different. So, I want to give you one last shot of what it looks like before this is done. It's already been quite a transformation, but it's going to get even better. We'll show you a little bit of the process of them doing it, and then uh the finished product is going to be phenomenal. All right, guys. We're here at the shop. We're going to pick out colors. That's one of the best things about this. You get to mix and match and custom pick your colors. I'll show you what I mean. Oh yeah, that I like that too. Plethora, you know, so we just need to kind of decide. Yeah. Can Can you throw a little white in there and look at it? 100% 100%. Yeah, cuz I like that right there. Oh, yeah. That looks sweet. All right, guys. We're going to uh let them get to work cuz I'm ready to get this boat out on the water. And uh we'll see you when we come pick it up. [Music] [Music] All right, guys. This is it. Uh, all done. At least phase one is all done. Uh, we're going to start with uh the Gimmlux components that they sent us. Uh, the rod holders. These were just regular cup holders here and we replaced them with cuprod holders which is real nice. Now we got four rod holders here on the back instead of just two. And up here we put in the 360 gym lux rod holders. They swivel all the way around. Good for when you're deep dropping uh using electric reel. Uh real nice. You saw those get installed. love them. Uh, all the Gym Lux products we used have been great. We got the Rodan trolling motor, but the big thing is it's got the C swivel on it. Uh, I've almost fallen in a couple times on Brock's boat. You got to get up on the gunnel to release it. The great thing about this while you're riding across going offshore, it locks in right here. All you got to do is undo this, slide it over. Now, instead of standing on the gunnel, you're standing on the bow. Then you just slide it down. Boom. Bring it up. Lock it in. It's locked in. All you got to do is lift this little knob. Swing it a little bit. That's it. So nice. Simple, but really effective. All right, guys. Uh, another big sport of their channel. It's Chaos Fishing Rods. They set me up already with uh two super nice spinning and conventional rods. You see how nice they are. You see me catch a lot of fish on them. Uh, I got more rods coming. You'll see them soon. They're sending me a couple tuna rods with bent butts, uh, two slow pitch rods, and a speed jigging rod. So, I'm excited to get all those. They'll look real nice. They'll all match. Uh, high quality. Uh, can't wait to get those out on the water and use them. So, big thanks to Chaos Fishing for the rods. Love them. All right, guys. This is the finished interior. You can see Brent is a perfectionist. Every single wire is labeled at both ends where it goes to. So there's never any doubt what wire goes where. So pretty pretty awesome. Uh so neat. Everything's just so neat in here. I want to thank Amped Outdoors again. You see that's their charger for the lithium trolling motor batteries. All of the batteries are inside here. It's a vented box. You saw that get custom made and designed and built. Pretty awesome stuff. We've got the Wet Sounds amplifier and we put in all new Wet Sound speakers. Really excited. The stereo is like way louder than I even need it to be and it's way louder than my wife wants it to be. So, but that all turned out so nice. Good look at the dash. Uh, Boardwalk Designs. Brent designed it. Boardwalk Designs built it. You can see the beautiful black acrylic. They did the custom engraving there. It looks so good. Just made the dash look so much better. It doesn't look like a 15-y old boat now. It looks like a brand new boat. Uh just beautiful work. You got to see Brent get those all ready polished up. But can't say enough about how great this dash is and how much I love it. And uh you see the little switches made a big difference putting new switches on. Just uh small little details like that help. Cheap, but makes a difference. Really like it. You see the custom live well lid Brent had built. Uh only thing left, we got to get a gasket for it. But you see how beautiful that the detail came out on that. And it's got the friction hinges so it stays open. Don't have to worry. But turned out super super nice. You can see the custom light fittings Brent had made for the Black Oak LEDs. They set us up with all new lights. Uh these are nice. You can turn it on, you know, the bright white light or you can have it come on as a blue light so when you're going at night, it doesn't blind you. But super nice, sleek. We got on the front, you can see the two black oak LED lights we got here. Super bright. All right. And as Brent talked about earlier, uh, this boat's set up for basically any kind of fishing you want to do. We've got a high frequency transducer, low frequency, and then we've also got a side scan, so you can switch between the three transducers on the unit. I got a Simrad ultrawide. You can see it here. Uh, it's so so nice, so easy to use. But if we want to go out to the oil rigs, fish for marlin, we can see down 5,000 feet if we need to uh come inshore. We can go to the side scan. We can fish for red fish or trout. Uh reef fishing, go to the high scan. Um it's just it basically does everything. And we've got the serious uh fish app on here. So, we get all the readings you want. Temperature brakes, weed lines, everything you want shows up on here. You can see here we put in the new Yamaha gauge with the command link. Brent hooked all that up. Uh, now we got digital readouts for everything right here on the screen. Uh, super handy. So, nice and looks a lot better than those old round gauges. Just look looks better. All right, another uh company that really helped us out a lot, Boat Outfitters. Uh they got just about everything online you could ever want for your boat, and they loaded us up. Uh they sent us this deep drop bucket, and the great thing is, you've seen the custom seats that we put in, just the slam latches. You just pull it up. We got our deep drop weights with us. We just drop that in there and we got a perfect spot to store all our deep drop weights out of the way. You could do the same thing with slow pitch jigs in the bucket. Uh endless setup. Also doubles as a potty for Michelle. So real convenient. You see how great these I mean this is solid. You just slide it back on. Latches down snug. Doesn't move. So, those seats turned out great. Another thing Boat Outfitters sent us. Great bait station. Uh, and it works real good in the 360 rod holder cuz you can swivel it and it's on a ball mount. So, no matter where it is on the boat, you can make it level. But another little extra thing it's got, see down here, you can even store a tackle tray down here in the bottom. Knife holder, cup holder, lure holder. Just super handy. Another thing boat out fender sent us over here. I'm always looking around. I'm sticking these on our rod holders and then they get misplaced. You're always looking for your leader. suction cup leader holder. It's not coming off. And you want to take the leader spool off. It's all you got to do. Comes off. Lock it on. It's very, very handy. Another boat outfitters product that we used on this is the cooler slide. So nice. The cooler's empty. So, but this is the cooler slide. It locks out and locks in. But, uh, a company that's been with me since the very beginning, Bay Baits Bait Shop here in Santa Rosa Beach, they, uh, gave me this nice Yeti cooler to use. So, I'm real excited. Got a nice cooler now. Matches the boat. Uh, matches everything. Slide that back in. It's easier when it's heavy. There we go. Now it's locked in. You see, it won't won't slide out. So, thanks to Bay Baits for the cooler. You guys are awesome. All right, you've seen the floor. You can see how nice the floor safe turned out. Just lined up everything perfect. Uh, I can't say enough good things about that. I just love it. It's amazing. It's nice. Gives you a little cushion, but the big thing, no slippage if your feet are wet. All right. Another company that's been great helping out the channel, uh, always supported me is Ego Fishing Products. Uh, they sent me several bags for the boat, waterproof, uh, super nice, durable bags. I use them when I go offshore to load all my gear in. But the big thing is the net. This is the handiest net I've ever had. The best thing about it is it's got a long handle, but if it's not long enough, you can't get the fish all the way boatside, extend it out, bring it in close, bring it up, land your fish. So awesome. So, thanks Ego for hooking me up with all that gear. And you can probably see how clean the boat is. I'm not the cleanest guy in the world. Michelle will attest to that. But Seaglow out of Destin came out, detailed the boat. Everything looks so nice and sparkling new. These seats, I don't know if you can if you saw them before. There was mildew stains, sun stains on these seats. They were yellow with black spots and stains. She got all the stains out. spent about eight hours going over this boat with a fine tooth comb and it just looks awesome now. So check out Seaglow Marine Services in Destin. She'll take good care of your boat. All right, guys. I almost forgot, but a very important piece of equipment that we got on this boat is the bean bags from Easy Rider. These are the most comfortable bean bags to ride in. And I think it's my wife's favorite piece of equipment on the boat. When we're heading offshore, she just plops right down there and doesn't move until we get to the fishing spot. So, big thanks to Easy Rider for sending us the bean bags. They're awesome. You guys go check them out online. All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed the video. Uh going to be part two this winter. We're going to have another add-on, add a bunch more stuff to the boat. Can't wait to get out, have some adventures on it. I got a lot of great videos coming your way. So, uh, thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Tight lines, everybody. I'll see you on the next one.