In a typical off-season—meaning winter—Team Saris Performance Marine in Bolton Landing, N.Y., has to lay off a couple of employees. But this year, thanks to an influx of powerboat restoration and renovation work from power upgrades for a pair of 22-foot Donzi sportboats to a re-rig of a 31-foot center console, the shop only had to give one employee a long winter break.
Team Saris Performance Marine is bringing a trio of vintage sportboats back to life.
“We were that busy with restoration and repower jobs,” said Johnny Saris, who works and races offshore alongside his father, Jason, who co-founded the shop with Richard Gage in 1987. “This is the busiest winter we’ve had in the past three or four years.”
Among those projects are three sportboats—a 30-foot Cigarette Vice equipped with twin Mercury Racing Engine 525 EFI engines and built in 2007, a 24-foot Cigarette Squadron completed in 1981 and a 20-foot Cigarette without a specific vintage—owned by former offshore racer Bob Witko, who campaigned a 32-foot Skater catamaran called Wits End in the 1990s.
Owned by the same client, this trio of Cigarette sportboats—30, 24 and 20 feet—will be renovated by spring.
and then