Console with livewell, rodholders and troller remote. Below, 70-horse planes her easily.

After a weekend of planting leased Alabama fields for deer season, Lloyd Bullock was driving home to Shalimar when he suddenly saw something at the edge of the country road that made him do a double-take. It was a boat with a For Sale sign propped on it. But that wasn’t what caught Bullock’s eye. What made him turn his truck around for a second look was the flare of the boat’s bow.

Some guys can’t keep their eyes off fancy curves and these were no different. He parked behind the roadside offering and got out to look her over. The boat’s sagging deck, torn carpet and rusty outboard barely registered in his mental picture gallery. What Lloyd saw more prominently was a widely flared bow that would make a fine fishing deck, one that not only could provide wide enough footing for his substantial frame, but one guaranteed to turn waves back on themselves as cleanly as a plow slicing spring soil.

When he finally finished ogling her front and got around to looking at the rest of her he realized that part was pretty sad. She was a 16-foot-long, 6-foot-wide old glass bass-fishing boat on a battered trailer. Her deck was soft as sponge, so was her transom; her windshield was broken, her cockpit was a shambles, her floorboards were waterlogged, and her outboard was junk. But her best feature, her high, outstanding wide bow was a beaut. As soon as Bullock found her owner he bought her on the spot.

Once he got her home Lloyd called up his long-time buddy to share the good news. Just hearing about it Todd Pumphery got excited. These two understood such things. As rock solid fishing buddies they had built fishing boats together before. Todd was married and had a business to run. Lloyd worked for the local hospital and was unmarried. That meant that they had nights to fish and any other spare moments to work on their boat-building projects. Todd could hardly wait to dive into this restoration project with Lloyd.

First chance they got the two girded themselves for the demolition that had to be done. Wearing goggles, caps, masks, gloves, Tyvac protective clothing, and hefting their demolition tools, the two looked like surgeons about to operate on a Monster Garage project.

“Ripping out the old bassboat-style decks and floor was a nasty job,” admitted Lloyd. “But we were well protected from flying debris.”

With grinders, circular saws, scrapers, diggers and other assorted wrecking tools they began to tear the boat apart. Rotted carpeting, soggy plywood deck, cracked bulkheads and waterlogged flooring were torn out. So was the soft, spongy transom. The dilapidated outboard wasn’t even fit for a museum. When they finished demolishing, all that remained was the shell of the hull with a suspicious gash in it where someone’s circular saw slipped and bit out a chunk. But that flared bow was still there, pristine and intact!

After reducing the boat to its only useable part the pair paused in their labors to make their plans. Lengthy discussions, exchanges of ideas, drawing plans and re-drawing, sketching, changing, designing things the way they wanted, took weeks. Then Lloyd researched core materials and the best deals he could find for boat building supplies on the Internet. Bubblegum containers left over from the Christmas parade were set aside for mixing resin. He found a distributor who would sell them foam, resin and cloth direct if they would meet his driver at one of his regular stops. Clamps, brushes, rollers, adhesives, stainless hardware and a chop gun were purchased. The latter would chop strands of fiberglass like yarn into 1-inch lengths which with resin would strengthen bulkheads. Bondo was bought for faring out areas, then rolls of fiberglass mat along with lots of sandpaper and paint. The necessary supplies were almost endless. But then, so, too, was this affair of the heart.