SURPRISE
Story by Brett
Boat builder and rebuild wizard Jay Pilini helps a customer transform an old Sidewinder for his son.
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Storman is no stranger to the boatere’s a restoration 8778)—was the natural choice to bring story that began the old hull to for an appraisal. The idea ing lifestyle. He’s the owner/operator of
when Brian Storman of St. Petersburg, FL, took his family scalloping. There, in a storage lot near the water, sat an old Sidewinder boat. “I just walked over to check it out and ended up buying it for a few hundred bucks to see if it was worth putting back together.” Storman’s friend of 25 years, boatbuilder Jay Pilini, recalls the old Sidewinder model very well. “We all grew up with the Sidewinder dealer here locally,” says the Florida native. “Brian is roughly the same age as me, and all of us wanted one of those boats when we were kids.” Pilini—the founder of Spectre Powerboats and the current owner of Pilini Marine Technologies (727-32970
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was to restore it for Storman’s son Brice as his main 2015 Christmas present. “We struck up a friendship right here in St Pete,” Pilini recalls. “He just opened a waterfront café and restaurant, so we started frequenting there and got reacquainted because I hadn’t seen him in several years.” Storman pitched the idea of fixing up the Sidewinder. “At first I condemned it, because it was going to be too much work. I just didn’t think it would be worth it. But eventually I just decided it was too cool of a boat to just throw away.” “It was wiped out when we found it,” adds Storman. “There were no seats in it and the floor was gone. But it had good structure—it was mostly all there.”
I.C. Sharks in Tampa Bay, a combination seafood market, tiki bar, live bait/tackle shop and boat rental center. “I’m a bit of a speedboat fanatic,” he admits. “I just haven’t been able to really mess with it until this point, but now I’m just starting to get Brice into it. My dad had a 1969 Sidewinder, so the 1974 Sidewinder was a pretty cool thing to find. ” Given the time and budgetary restrictions, Pilini’s plan was to have his crew work on it after hours, a little bit at a time; Storman paid the labor on it and such to keep the costs under control. Pilini confronted the boat’s many problems, including the rotting floor and stringers, and the original gelcoat had baked off. Fortunately, the original windspeedboat.com
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