Ricky Scarborough builds boats from fiberglass and epoxy, but his secret ingredients are family and community.
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 of North Carolina sportfish builders.
