2022-3-6 The one about Aquatraction Part 1
This week on Sundays With Sully we take look into marine decking in particular Aqua Traction. Jason from Aqua Traction New England was nice enough stop in the studio and discuss his product with us and talk about some of the pro's and cons of the product line. Want to know more about it give Jason an e-mail kjsportfishing@gmail.com and check out www.aquatraction.com for more details. Be sure to give us a follow for part two of this where we get set up and install this product on a 23 Reef Runner.
Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Sundays with Sully. This week we are talking about decking and deck matting. We've got Jason here from Aquatraction and he's going to kind of give us an overview of the product. You guys, I'm sure you've been on different boats. You've seen all the different brands that are out there. And what kind of sets his apart from what's going on out there and the ability for you to come onto their boat and actually do this stuff, right? Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the product line and what kind of sets Aquatraction apart.
I'm Jason from Aquatraction. I handle most of New England I've trained some of our other East Coast dealers. Company is about eight years old. I'm going into my seventh year. Company started in a horse barn in Minnesota and has gradually grown and grown. And, you know, now here we are. We're a full service installation company, so we digitally template. So we get aboard the boat digitally template. It goes into a CAD program, modeling software program, eventually caught by C and C and then we install it.
So it's all custom fit is we'll go out and show you guys here shortly on a boat. You can come in with this piece and it's going to be fit for that boat. So you don't have to necessarily files for each boat because everybody's going to be a little different, right? No matter what they are, everybody's always a little.
We save every file to go into our database. It helps us to court future jobs. And also to, you know, recut if someone damages. But we don't we don't reuse files.
Okay. That's I think that's a key thing to point out, is that it's it's not cookie cutter. It is custom. And you have custom colors available. Right. We have different foam densities and we can do a top layer, bottom layer colors and things like that. Right.
And then we can do, you know, laser etch different images.We have a database of anatomically correct fish. So there's nothing worse than a goofy fish. We have Striped bass, tarpon, snow, swordfish, white marble, marlin, a few tuna. So a few options for people.
So get that we can do. I'm sure everybody see like the ruler or whatever if they want to put it on their gunnel and have it right there and we have that feature with it as well. Talk to me about like durability, longevity. How, how is this stuff going to hold up and, you know, in the marine environment out there?
Great question. We get it every week, every day. So, you know, it is foam, right? It is not it's not bulletproof. So we've got projects. We've got a charter boat in Miami. You know, he fishes 200 plus days a year. His deck is almost four years old and he takes good care of his stuff. And it looks great, you know? So it requires cleaning just like the rest of the boat. Can't drop a rod butt you can place things down on it. With reasonable care and maintenance, people should get 5 to 7 plus years out of it. You know, it doesn't it doesn't fall apart over the years. It will show some things here and there. But we might replace a piece. Right. But we've had very few peeling issues. We've had, you know, very, very few remarkably few staining issues.
And as far as cleaning, we need special solutions to clean this. Or can we just off the shelf, you know, simple green or whatever or anything like that, regular.
Regular boat soap, simple green, and you don't have to be afraid to really get into it. You're not going to tear it up too gentle with it. And the stain doesn't come up. They get into a little bit and put. And, you know, it's it's actually easier to clean than older oxidized gel coat, you know?
And this will stick down. Speaking of gel, this will go right down on top of the existing deck. Is a solid deck correct there? I mean, obviously, we want make sure that we're a solid substrate that's sticking to if we've got flex in your deck, it's going to give it heaps of problems and things like that. Right. You're not going to make it stronger by putting this on, correct?
Yeah. So most boats have pretty modest non-slip patterns. So in those cases, we can apply a second layer of glue tape. It's almost like it's like a gel glue. Okay. So the second layer allows that to be kind of gooey enough to get down in all those. So it's a little bit more work, but we can do it in as far. Yeah. So in the deck also has to be solid, right. If, if there's water in the deck, if it's a sopping wet, you know, there are probably cracks in it.
