Anyone who’s ever said that perfect is the enemy of good enough has never met Ricky Scarborough. It’s a thought that comes to mind as I wander the Scarborough Boatworks factory on a dreary spring day with Ricky and his Office and Marketing Manager Kayleigh Hatchell. The master North Carolina boatbuilder has been walking alongside and beneath the elevated hull of a 67-foot sportfisher called Waterman. She’s about halfway through her build, thoroughly flared, sleek and gorgeous. Taking in the sweep of her hull, Ricky stops to scrutinize a 50-foot-plus long strip of wood about three-quarters of the way up called an intermediate guard. There’s some minor function to the guard—lightly blunting an impact and maybe knocking down a few drops of spray, but mostly, it serves as a nice aesthetic line roughly demarcating the point where the hull really begins to flare at the bow and the inward-curving tumblehome.
To me, Hatchell, and probably 99.99 percent of us, the guard would appear to follow a perfect horizontal line along the hull contours. But we’re not Ricky Scarborough. “That just looks a little off,” Ricky says rubbing his chin. He walks back and forth, then climbs up a set of temporary stairs to peer down on the guard from the starboard gunwale. He secures a ruler and measures. It’s off—by what Hatchell later reckons is less than half an inch. Scarborough sighs and smiles. It’ll have to be re-aligned.
“That was all his eyes,” Hatchell says later in one of Ricky’s offices. “There’s no tool there.”
“He grew up with his dad doing the same thing,” Ricky’s wife Sarah adds with a laugh.
It was the sharp eye and calloused hands of Ricky’s dad, Rick Scarborough Sr., that set Ricky on a trajectory that has today landed him among the rarified ranks
