Project—Kentucky Owner Shepherds Catamaran Build-Out From Bare Hull To Beauty
A little more than a year ago, Ray Brasher acquired a new 34-foot catamaran from Smart Performance Marine. The boat was just a bare hull, which he actually helped lay-up, at the time. But a bare hull was exactly what the automobile body shop owner in Madisonville, Ky., wanted, because from the start his goal was to subcontract rigging and interior installation and handle most of the paintwork himself.
The Rock The River Fun Run was the first organized summer event for the Brashers in their 34-footer. Photo by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.
Brasher tasked Outcome Marine Group of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., to install the 34-footer’s Mercury Racing 500R outboard engines and handling all rigging. For interior installation, he turned to a friend who prefers to remain unnamed.
Yet when it came to painting the cat, Brasher was mostly a one-man show. He had automobile-painting experience through his business and he’d helped the crew at Stephen Miles Design in Owensboro, Ky., a few times. Miles created a design for the catamaran and created the paint-masks for the project. He even sent a couple of employees to help Brasher place the masks on the cat. Then Brasher he was on his own.
Brasher planned to debut the cat in late May at the Kuttawa Cannonball Run on his home-waters of Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake. His schedule was tight. He had 35 days to paint the boat before it had to be in rigging if he were have it ready for the eighth annual Kuttawa event.
“I did a lot of 12- to 16-hour days laying down colors,” he said, then chuckled.
A work in progress.
Said Miles, who doesn’t hand out compliments lightly, “Ray did a good job, especially for a guy who doesn’t paint boats every day.”
Brasher missed his deadline by five days. Outcome Marine’s George Selley actually traveled to Kentucky to help out with the setup for the boat’s still-unpainted 500-hp outboards. Still working on final details on site in Kuttawa on Friday morning, May 31, the day of the first lunch run, they missed the run itself but still made it to the raft-up.
Brasher painted the outboards after the Kuttawa event. Selley stuck around to help him reinstall them.
In July, Brasher and his wife, Crystal, ran the cat to the Bahamas alongside their friend Nick Evans, who took his center console. The couple followed that up with the Rock The River Fun Run in Cincinnati and the Lake of the Ozarks Shootout in Central Missouri on back-to-back weekends in late-/august. Thanks to their friends Yvonne Aleman and Greg Harris—who own their second DCB M37R catamaran and joined the DCB grouping at Super Cat Fest instead of staying in their original dock space—the Brashers had dockage at the Camden at the Lake Resort during the Shootout.
Ray and Crystal Brasher joined their friends Greg and Heather Scheller of Kentucky on the couple’s new DCB Performance Marine M37R catamaran for the Lake Powell Challenge event earlier this month.
“It runs great,” said Brasher, who previously owned a Trident deckboat and an American Offshore catamaran. “It handles the water really well for a smaller boat. I love the look of it, all the curves and such. And I love the colors.”
As well he should, because he had more than a little to do with applying them.
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