Blood Money
Here’s the concept drawing of the Skater’s new paint job, by Visual Imagination. “Back then, there was really no such thing as the big boats we see nowadays,” he recalls. “Or, at least, not too many people had them.” After school, Golie focused on launching his own company (Golden West Biologicals Inc., a manufacturer of human and animal biological products) and got out of the boating scene while concentrating on the business he started out of his mother’s garage in 1989. Later, when the “need for speed” returned, his interest shifted to larger boats, finding a playground in Southern California’s Lake Elsinore. “I used to do a lot of water skiing there,” he says. “I used to go out early in the morning and do ski runs before I came to work.” When the passion hit hard around 2005, he purchased a 24-foot HTM cat powered by a 565
that delivered triple-digit top speeds. It was around that time that Golie (with Fred Young and Steve Gurlitz) launched another company—the speedboat builder Innovative Marine Concepts, or IMC. “We basically threw our money together and started building boats.” It was Fred Young who sent Golie an ad he found online for the 1991 40' Skater. At the time, the boat was painted white and blue, with red and yellow accents, featuring a classic deck configuration. The boat was purchased from World Champion Offshore Racer Randy Kent of Speed Racer fame, who was handling it as part of an estate sale. On his first encounter with the boat, Golie saw potential in the boat, and immediately set about de-rigging it with plans to redo the interior and repaint the boat. The 850 engines were removed and sold, then eventually be replaced with 1075s. The drives, which had been rebuilt by a shop, blew apart during one outing. So Golie decided to put the boat in the hands of Vern Gilbert of West Coast Drives (Lake Havasu City, AZ). “I wasn’t sure if he was interested in doing a complete redo on this boat,” Golie says, “but I took it to him with the blown-up drives, and he put them all back together and made them like brand new.” Next, the 1075s were removed and sent to Carson Brummett, who did some fine-tuning on them—leak-down, pressure, dynotuning, etc. “He did like $20,000 worth of upgrades to these two motors,” Golie says. Among other things, it required replacing various bearings and pulleys that were gone. “It just wasn’t cool, man,” Golie says. Then another problem reared its ugly head. “The first time I took this boat out for a test run, both of the tanks were full of water because they hadn’t been plugged up correctly,” Golie says. “Can you imagine how much power that took away from the boat, having 400 gallons of water in the tanks? We didn’t find out about that until after Randy started de-rigging it—after he pulled the back seats out, he looked down and exclaimed, ‘What the hell?’
Golie reworks the dash.
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S P E E D B O A T | March 2015
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