Photo courtesy Yves Belanger & speedonthewater.com
This brand new custom “KONG” powerboat was tested recently in the waters outside our headquarters. Everyone here at TNT Custom Marine prides themselves on all of our services but we can’t help putting a little extra into our custom rigging services. Recently our crew got this gorgeous machine ready for testing and headed to the water with powerboat fanatic and client Yves Belanger.
Skater Powerboats enthusiast Yves Belanger got a chance to run KONG, his new 50-foot Skater catamaran, last weekend out of Miami’s TNT Custom Marine, which finished rigging the boat and installing its interior last week. Belanger’s Skater 50 dubbed KONG was water-tested last weekend when the team from TNT Custom Marine in North Miami launched the radical catamaran for the first time.
“It is absolutely perfect—everyone involved with the boat did an unbelievable job,” said Belanger, who sold his G-Force Skater 438, which also has twin Mercury Racing 1550/1350 engines, a few months ago. “I can’t believe how well it all came together. Johnny (TNT co-owner John Tomlinson) and I took the boat out for a shakedown on Saturday and my wife, Kyra, and I used it the rest of the weekend. It is amazing; the boat runs great. TNT has a few things to work on to get it dialed in before I come back to Miami in a couple of weeks to run it again.”
The boat was delivered to TNT Custom Marine for the rigging side of the new build. Tomlinson said the team at TNT took a couple of months to rig the 50-footer and its turbocharged dual-calibration QC4v engines before dropping in the detailed green, gray and white interior and the accompanying hand-stitched steering wheel wrap last week. “We didn’t get to run the boat up to speed but we got it up to 147 mph approaching 6,000 rpm,” Tomlinson said. “We need to adjust the water pickups and do a little more testing, but we’re thinking it should be a 160-mph boat in 1350 mode. It is a wave-crusher, that’s for sure, which is what Yves wanted.”
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Original and complete article published on speedonthewater.com
