One Do-It-Yourself, Bad-Ass Blue Beauty
An automotive paint-and-body man with a shop in Madisonville, Ky., Ray Brasher and his wife, Crystal, would love to own a new DCB Performance Marine M37R catamaran as do their dear friends and fellow Kentuckians Greg and Heather Scheller. Hell, for that matter, the Brashers wouldn’t turn down a new M42R, the Phoenix builder’s latest model.
If you’re going to dream, dream big, right?
But neither boat is their immediate budget. Yet the couple still owns a head-turning 34-foot powered by Mercury Racing 500R engines. And it was a labor of love from the start.
Brasher bought the hull and deck from Smart Performance Marine. The boat was just a bare hull, which he actually helped lay-up, at the time. But that fit perfectly with his goal of handling most of the paintwork himself and was to subcontract rigging and interior installation.
Outcome Marine Group of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., installed the 34-footer’s Mercury Racing outboards and handling all rigging. For the interior build-out, Brasher tasked a friend who prefers to remain unnamed.
To start the paintwork, he turned to his friend Stephen Miles Design in Owensboro, Ky., where he had worked 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 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.
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.
Not only did the Brashers tackle an ambitious project, they didn’t wait long to take the finished product on an ambitious adventure. In July 2023, they ran to the Bahamas for their first time. Their friend, Nick Evans, joined them in his center console.
The couple followed that up with something a bit closer to home, the Rock The River Fun Run in Cincinnati followed by 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 Widebody 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 on the Lake Resort during Shootout week.
Most recently, as in last Saturday, the couple ran the cat in the Fort Myers Offshore trek to the Naples Hyatt House for lunch.
“It runs great,” said Brasher. “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.”
And why not? He picked and applied them.
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Source: https://www.powerboatnation.com/one-do-it-yourself-bad-ass-blue-beauty/
