While I was competing in the recent Carhartt College Wild Card presented by Bass Pro Shops, photographer Ronnie Moore took a picture of my boat and plenty of people immediately noticed that my boat doesn’t look like other ones. I’ve gotten pretty used to this over the past four years.
Most bass boats come with the standard dark or neutral colored carpet when new, and then are eventually re-carpeted with similar material when it’s time to replace. I did something different, let me tell you why. When I got my boat, the first thing to change was adding a vinyl wrap which helped in covering numerous gel coat issues, while also improving the aesthetics of the boat by leaps and bounds.
I knew next I’d have to address the carpet. The original carpet was destroyed from years of sitting outside soaking up the rays, melting the glue which made it more difficult to walk around on without slipping. When I looked into replacing the carpet, I found out very quickly that it was not an option with my “I’m a sophomore in college” budget. Carpet work can also be very tedious and time demanding if I were to take on the challenge of re-carpeting on my own. I thought it would be neat to use a different material for the boat, so I looked up the material they use on ski boats and jet skis. It wasn’t long until I came up with the idea of just using the same material they use for ski boats and jet skis instead of carpet. It looked like it would work great, and it was pretty cheap, too.
At the time I was able to order the material through a marine products distributor, the exact brand being called Hydro-Turf. Hydro-Turf makes a wide array of color patterns to be used on their various types of turf, and when I went to order some I had to chose between grey, white, black, about 10 different shades of grey, blue, yellow black camo, and rasta camo.
I looked through the colors and was sold immediately on the rasta camo. Why? I really don’t have a better answer than “Why not?”. I had thought it looked neat and would be a funny fit with my already contrasting boat.
The boat’s original color being bright blue, the new vinyl wrap being bright yellow, I figured a little green and red and yellow carpet wouldn’t hurt anything. My decision to go with the crazy rasta camo pattern is one that I do not regret even in the slightest. It has been a great deck carpet replacement for me over the course of 4 years, and has sparked many conversations of all sorts. Old guys always say it is too bright or that it is too crazy and out there, younger people seem to always think it is cool or “lit”, everyone who notices it remembers it.
And the girls dig it. Which is a plus for a college aged guy.
