Flylab Interview: Shaun Cagley

Flylab Interview: Shaun Cagley

Shaun Cagley is the Director of Operations for Boulder Boat Works, a custom drift boat builder from Carbondale, CO, making light, responsive and maintenance-free drift boat hulls from advanced polyethylenes (polymer). All of the Boulder Boat Works hull designs integrate old-world craftsmanship with new-world materials.

We sat down recently to discuss the history of the brand, recent BBW design innovations and the challenges of designing and hand-crafting western style drift boats from high-grade plastics.

Tell us about your role at Boulder Boat Works.

I guess it’s been evolving ever since I started three years ago. I began as the Director of Operations and now I’m the Managing Partner of all commercial operations. I oversee sales, marketing, run the online store, do a lot of the customer service stuff and I’m on the phone communicating with our clients and owners.

You’re the dude.

I’m kind of the face of the brand, which is a lot of work, but I also get to have all the fun too, because it’s important that I’m on the river, head up events and connect with our community.

The rest of the guys do all the hard work–building the actual boats and managing the production floor. I feel like I got the better end of that deal.

Boulder Boat Works (BBW) has been around for 20 years? It was obviously started by Andy Toohey, my friend, and you know Andy, but can you give us a quick history and evolution of the company?

The story I heard is that Andy had built some wooden drift boats in the past, but he was never really able to fish, because he didn’t trust people to row his boats down the river–he was trying to create a more durable solution. Obviously not fiberglass, aluminum or wood and I guess he found this marine grade polymer–they’ve been using it a long time for welding water storage containers and a bunch of other stuff. He figured out how to use this new material, but still retain the wooden drift boat “look.” So, it evolved into a really interesting combination of new-age materials with an old-school “wooden looking” construction and aesthetic. 

The business started in Boulder, CO (near you), moved out to Longmont, then eventually moved west to Carbondale, Colorado about eight years ago. We moved the business up here because that’s where the new ownership was located, and it put us a lot closer to a bunch of great trout water.

You guys needed to be on a river from day one. Even though Andy started it here in Boulder, it was always funny to me that it wasn’t on the water.

Yeah, there are positives and negatives. When operating a business in the Roaring Fork Valley we end up paying a lot for rent, labor and all of the other business overhead, which can be a little bit more difficult. But the access to the water and rivers was the right move for us. We’re not going to have as many people stopping in to look at boats, but when they do, we can get them on the river for a demo float. There was no way to do that on the Front Range.

The plastic is HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene), correct?

Yeah, there are two different styles of polymer we use: HDPE, which is High-Density Polyethylene, and then a VHMW, which is a Very High Molecular Weight Polyethylene. It’s essentially the same material, but the characteristics and density of the plastic is a little bit different. The whole bottom of our boats is a ⅜-inch piece of VHMW and same with the sidewalls. They’re structurally more dense and built with this heavier material. 

Then all the interior and components are built with a HDPE, which is very similar material, just a lighter weight. We’re always looking for ways to reduce the weight of the boats. Structurally, we use the more dense material for the hull of the boat–that’s where the drift boat will get the most impacts and wear and tear on the river. Then for the interior and components, like I said, we’re using a lighter material to shed weight.    

Just to dig a little deeper into the characteristics of the material (and why it’s so great from a boat building perspective)–it doesn’t get hot, it doesn’t get cold, it’s tough as hell and there’s a “low sound” component? Sadly, lower water volume is probably going to be the norm moving forward, and more durable boats will make a ton of sense.

No one really wants to be promoting low water conditions, but that’s probably the new norm and reality, I agree. We’ve been selling some boats out east lately and this has been a big part of the reasoning: our performance in low water and rocky rivers is far superior.

One fishing guide I followed up with was able to extend his guide season an additional three weeks to a month last year. When everyone else was off the river because of the water, or the lack of, he was still out there bumping and grinding–working, making money and catching fish. So, we’re trying to lean into that a little bit more from a marketing perspective, but it’s always a challenge to “explain” the performance characteristics of our boats. You really have to row the boat to get a good feel. Last week, we were rowing a stretch of river that’s notoriously skinny, especially this time of year, and I am always blown away with some of the shelves and rock gardens we are able to get through. I’m not sure you could get a raft through some of that stuff without getting hung up.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this too, but you’re headed down a chute or rocky line in one of your boats and people get pretty clenched up. I’m like, “Trust me.” Just push and hit it hard and you’ll slide over it–a lot of times it’s easier than a raft.

Absolutely, because rubber rafts, fiberglass, aluminum, they’re stickier when you’re interacting with rocks and river debris and our material is super slick. Also, the way that we construct the boats is that they’re made to “flex.” So, when you’re rolling over stuff, you can feel the boat flexing and moving over rocks–honestly, it’s pretty crazy. I always joke that you can take the dicey looking boulder line down the river and typically fish water that no one else is running. More often than not, that translates to catching more fish. You’re also not having to get out of the boat and walk that stuff either, which in Colorado can be trespassing. 

The boat also tracks in skinnier water, because of the natural buoyancy of the material, which is something people really don’t think about. If you throw a piece of polymer into the river, it’s going to float forever–it’s never going to sink. The boat and hull still displace water, but the natural buoyancy of the material gives it a different feel on the oars and a much lighter weight. You can take two big strokes and lift the whole boat up and out of the water–once it gets up on a plane (reduced drag, increased efficiency), it has pretty remarkable lightness and maneuverability. I know I’m biased, but it’s a pretty cool feeling that you won’t find with many other boats.

The boats also “slide” over rocks without much noise, or leaving paint everywhere. Sliding in a hard boat is one of the worst things you can do when you’re hunting bigger fish. They hate all the sound and racket.   

BBW boats are not molded, but welded, correct? It seems like the whole boat only has a handful of welds?  

The weld of the chine (the sharp edge where the bottom meets the side) is the most structurally durable part of the entire boat. It’s essentially the same material the bottom and sidewalls are made out of, and when we weld the sidewall to the bottom–it ends up being about 1.5 to 2-inches of material we build up. Above this (going up the sidewall) we ad a few more inches of the material with a decorative flair. We call this the Viking Ship. Visually, it’s appealing and provides some cool lines, but it’s also adding an additional quarter inch of polymer material at that chine. And speaking of chines, we also hand scrape and form them, so they’re more pronounced and a lot different than you’d see in most production drift boats. 

Do you roll the chine straight under the boat?

Our chines have more of a lip to them, which helps in a lot of rowing scenarios, keeping the boat straight. I always love the feeling of tracking across the water and doing a quick little scissor stroke and feeling the boat swing right into the line you want it to be on. The pronounced chines definitely help with that. 

We have some guides up on the South Fork of the Snake in Idaho, and they thought the chines were a bit “too grabby” sometimes. Some of the hydraulics on that river can be pretty big and burly, so we essentially started detuning our chines for those guys. We were able to tune, just like a snow ski, the bow and the stern, so they were able to slide in and out of those big eddies and hydraulics and not have the boat be so grabby. We kept the traditional chine, right under the oarlocks, so you still have that trackability.

Like a twin-tip snow ski…

Exactly. It’s just like tuning a winter ski. And because our boats are hand-built and hand-scraped, we have the ability to tweak and customize the product for these different river scenarios.

Can you walk us through the three boat models? 

We have a traditional high side dory, a low side dory and a river skiff, so three hull designs.

The high side is our classic dory for bigger water and also our most versatile vessel.

The low side dory is essentially the same bottom and sidewalls as the high side, except the bow is 9-inches shorter and transitions from the bow to right behind the oarlock. The low side has better sight lines and is better in the wind, but it isn’t able to tackle some of the bigger water and waves that I know you like to run in your boat. It’s also lighter, because we’re removing 17 pounds of material.

The river skiff is technically a river pram, but the term “skiff” is the name the industry has adopted. It’s a blunt nose design with low sidewalls and wider at the beam. It’s a more stable boat. It still has rocker, but not quite as much as our dory profiles. But it’s still a pretty nimble boat on the oars. 

Inside of the boat, our flagship buildout started with the Pro Guide–that’s mostly white ash for the structural components: gunnels, ribs, bow stem, transom plates and seat rails. The step down from that is our Guide Boat, which was formerly known as the Convertible River Taxi. It still has some wooden structure in the gunnels, bow stem and transom plate, but the actual frame itself on the interior is an NRS frame. I actually think it’s pretty cool. It makes it a lighter weight boat, and it makes the boat a little more modular. With a half-inch socket, you can adjust your benches, if you want to move your weight back–same with the seat rails and towers.

The last boat I sold, the guy loved that he was able to take the bench top off with four bolts, and then he can adjust the width of the crossbars and drop his cooler in for overnights and stuff like that. In Colorado there’s a lot of “raft country,” so I think it’s cool for guys to be able to pull all their dry boxes and coolers out and pop them right into our guide frames. For people who have invested a ton of time and money into raft frames, this is a really cool feature if they’re looking for a dory. They can get our stripped down boat model and still use a lot of their own components and equipment. It’s a pretty sweet setup where you can use existing gear, coolers, boxes–it’s plug and play.

Do you guys also have a pedestal setup? 

Yeah, we call that our hybrid–a hybrid between our pro guide and a true walkaround. In all three models–the high side, low side and skiff–we do a hybrid. It has the dry box in the oarsman position and then in the front you can have a walkaround cooler or box. The same for the rear angler position–you can do a cooler box back there too. This new design all came with the development of the river skiff. Andy came up and helped us with the design, along with a few other designers–it was about six months of R&D, and we came out with three or four different prototypes.    

The big change with the skiff was the introduction of the rod trays. With the rod trays, you needed to have a walkaround front position, but we still had the traditional bench and this created a difference in height, so we had to figure out how to work around that. Ultimately, we introduced aluminum ribbing and structures in the front of the boat. We were able to actually make the skiff as a full walkaround. Then we carried the design over to our low side and figured out how to do a low side walkaround with the rod tray. And recently, we just built our first high side with a rod tray. 

Can you give us a story of someone who took a BBW boat where they shouldn’t have and came out unscathed?

Well, it’s kind of crazy, but I can only think of a few boats that were damaged beyond repair, and those were all in automobile accidents. I was talking to a guy this winter who was running his down the Arkansas River and that’s definitely 100% raft country.

I’ve taken my boat down to Arkansas a few times and people are always like, “Dude, I don’t know, man...” I’m like, “Chill.”

Most of the stories I hear are more about the launches than the actual rivers themselves. Pretty interesting stories about what people are doing with our boats to get access to water. Without burning any spots, I know of a few places where guys are lowering their boats down with a drag system–big rocky embankments to get to water no one else fishes in a hard boat. That’s where the boat design can really shine–the opportunities to access more remote places.

There are a couple launches I’d like to do a photo shoot at, but as a brand, we don’t really like to talk access up–the slide up on XXXXXXX XXXX, that’s a pretty gnarly launch.

There’s a couple videos on our Instagram feed about how durable the polymer is–my partner Trevor, who’s our production lead, is swinging a full-size axe and smashing the side. But from a durability standpoint, the impacts you’re taking on the river are nothing compared to an axe. We’ve also thought about dropping one off the forklift, from 20 feet up, and seeing what happens–I have all the confidence in the world that it would just bounce and flex. But we’ve definitely pulled some boats out of the water. They’re all still rowing down the river today.

I know at one point Andy told me he didn’t know of a single BBW boat that had a hole in it. Is that still true?

I think there was one–the Montana Department of Wildlife. I’m pretty sure they hit a piece of rebar at full speed while the boat was fully loaded with shocking equipment and huge water tanks. It popped a little hole in it, but we quickly welded it and it’s still on the water. But other than that, they’re mostly still fishing, unless it was something irreparable like a car accident. But even some that have been in car accidents are still rolling down the river–new gunwale or transom plate, and they’re back in business.

How have the rivers in the Roaring Fork Valley influenced your design thought process?

It’s definitely allowed us to lean into the performance aspects of the boats–what they can actually handle. These are some of the highest gradient rivers in the state, and in the middle of winter, when there’s not a ton of water, we can really understand what they’re capable of.

But in terms of BBW’s design evolution, our biggest changes came from the process of making the river skiff–that allowed us to figure out the rod trays, and we transferred that into the low side and now the high side. 

Are there any other models, updates, sneaky stuff coming down the pike that you can talk about?

I kind of spilled the beans on the rod tray and the high side. And we’ve talked about some R&D with some different types of boats, but I don’t know, the reality of our hand-crafted production model becomes pretty cost prohibitive. We learned that with the skiff, how much time and money went into a new boat model.

Last question: When are you building my dream boat? A two-man whitewater fishing Ferrari…

Well, that’s the thing, any design is “possible.” We had a guy we were just talking to who wanted us to design a boat specifically for him. I mean, we can do it, but it’s going to take a lot more time and material than our standard boat. We just lobbed a number out at him–what can he do other than say no, right?

So, if you’ve got XX grand laying around, Tim, we might be able to come up with a great boat design for you.

When I get there, I’ll let you know. Someday.

We’ll be here, and we’re happy to build it.

Boulder Boat Works’ dedication to the craft of boat building.