In town for this weekend’s Florida Powerboat Club Tampa Bay Poker Run, Skater catamaran owners Justin Beischel, Joey Castellano and Chris LaMorte opted out of today’s short lunch-run to waterfront location in Tampa Bay for a longer trek of their own. The trio of friends and their lucky passengers headed to Shore Restaurant on Longboat Key.
Just two of the catamarans arrived at their destination as a broken transmission sidelined Beischel and company on the outbound leg. I knew the Ohio-based electrician is handy tools—he built the 900-hp supercharged engines in 368 catamaran as well as the trailer that carries it—but I had no idea he is part Boy Scout. The guy came to Tampa with a spare transmission in his truck, for heaven’s sake.
A few other things I learned today? Two-year-old Lucas LaMorte’s hair grows like bamboo, despite that his father’s does not.
“He’s probably had 20 haircuts,” LaMorte said, then laughed.
LaMorte’s friend Chris Ryder, who joined Castellano on his 38-footer, has a son who is also named Chris and is just a few months younger than LaMorte’s lad. At just 22 months old, Chris Ryder, Jr., has been to most of the best streak-houses in the Northeast, according to his devout carnivore dad.
“We take him everywhere,” said Ryder, whose reimagined Skater 368 cat should be rigged and on the water in a couple of months. “He’s amazing.
“When we had him, people were like, ‘You probably had to give up everything you liked before you had a kid,’” he added, then shook his head and chuckled. “Not even close.”
Unlike the LaMorte and Ryder boys, Ethan Muller—the 23-year-old son of Electronics Unlimited principal Ron Muller—can speak for himself. The father-and-son duo joined us on LaMorte’s 36-footer for the lunch run. A senior at the University of Central Florida, Muller and a couple of engineering majors just finished “converting a gasoline engine to run on hydrogen.”
“It was our senior project,” he explained.
Relentless hair growth, high-end red-meat consumption and fuel-system conversion? The things you learn about your friends’ kids these days. —Matt Trulio
