#60 - Tom Trembath - He Sold Everything to Built Boats Instead

Tom Trembath isn't your typical boat builder. He grew up in Ghana and Papua New Guinea — his dad moved the family across the world and everywhere they went, they fished. Under Portuguese slave castles on the Ivory Coast. On the Fly River catching black bass no one had told him existed.

He came back to Australia, got a mechanical engineering degree he didn't love, and spent years running construction projects in places he didn't want to be. Then COVID froze the world. He sold everything, planned to travel Australia with his partner but ended up stuck in Brisbane, and found himself driving back to his old desk at a Sunshine Coast construction company.

Five years later, Merino Boatworks is producing world-class stepped-hull fishing centre consoles out of Cairns, designed by Michael Peters Yacht Design — the same firm behind Formula, Cigarette and Bertram. Vacuum infused, fully cored, built by a tight crew of young men who trained themselves from nothing in a discipline that barely exists in Australia.

The first boat was sold drunk at the Weipa Golf Club over a handshake.

In this episode Tom and Wade go deep on mortality, the real cost of ambition, what it means to actually back yourself, and how a bunch of 'idiots pointing in the same direction' built something genuinely world class. Plus — Wade's NZ hunt blizzard at 2000m elevation on the West Coast that destroyed three tents and ended in a foil bivvy, and a Torres Strait quasi-arrest involving cocaine runners, Border Force, and the happiest people either of them have ever met.

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