After logging more than 600 hard-earned miles in the Bahamas aboard the Deep Impact 499, including long stretches in true offshore punishment, I came home wondering if the boat was genuinely exceptional—or if I’d simply been swept up in an unforgettable trip. With friendships, luxury anchorages, and advertiser relationships all in the mix, separating emotion from evaluation wasn’t optional—it was essential. So I turned to someone whose opinion in performance boating I trust implicitly: legendary builder and former Powerboat magazine test driver John Tomlinson. If the 499 was the real deal, he’d say so—and if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t pull a single punch.
During a weeklong trip to the Bahamas in June, I fell in love with the Deep Impact Custom Boats 499 center console. I logged 600-plus miles—more than 60 of them in 7-to-10-footers—in the 49-footer powered by six Mercury Racing 500R outboard engines. The owner of Deep Impact, my longtime friend my Mark Fischer was at the helm. His wife, Eileen, and our mutual friends Stu and Jackie Jones of the Florida Powerboat Club and their son, Tyler, were among the passengers aboard during our adventures.
Commanding as it was rough water, the 32,000-pound boat was 80-plus-mph fast in the smooth stuff. When we weren’t overnighting in posh environs on land, the elegant beauty was our spacious home.
But all of that—exploring the Bahamas for a week and being spoiled rotten by the Fischers—begged an honest question.
Was my appreciation for the 499 real or was it simply the byproduct of great fortune and circumstance?
More full disclosure? Deep Impact is a significant speedonthewater.com advertiser. Was I seeing the boat through financially tinged, rose-colored glasses or was it the real thing? For the sake of his or her readers, a good publisher tries hard to separate those things. But absolute objectivity can be elusive.
So I needed some objective, third-party validation. And when it comes to that in the boating world I turn to longtime friend John Tomlinson of TNT Custom Marine in Miami. A living legend in the performance-boating industry, Tomlinson moonlighted for years each fall as a Powerboat magazine test-driver. As his frequent co-pilot/note-taker, I shared almost 100 cockpits with him.
When Tomlinson liked a boat, he told me. When he didn’t like a boat, he told me, “I wouldn’t own it.”
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Original article published on speedonthewater.com
