You won’t find Ron Szolack watching fireworks with a big crowd this Saturday night. Szolack isn’t a big-crowd, stay-up-late guy. His most likely July 4 celebration scenario will involve catching whatever display he can see from the deck of his home at the Lake of the Ozarks in Central Missouri, then crashing because he gets up early.
Ron Szolack’s latest Skater prize is slated to be on the water in three weeks.
“You know me,” he said this afternoon in a brief interview this afternoon, then chuckled. “I won’t be leaving the house.”
For the record, Szolack has a really cool house. No one wants to leave it.
Plus, cool as the ballistic light show for the nation’s 250th birthday will surely be, Szolack has his own fireworks coming in the form of a new Skater Powerboats 388 catamaran. Performance Boat Center in Osage Beach currently is handling the final rigging of the eight-seat 38-footer’s Mercury Racing 1100 engines.
Szolack said the boat should be ready for the lake in three weeks.
“They got the dash in—it’s going good,” Szolack explained. “They really just started on Monday. They were super-busy with the Cigarette Rendezvous and Powered by Performance events last weekend.
Craig Ellis at Appearance Products in Grand Rapids, Mich., created the cat’s color-matched interior. Skater paint-wizard Steve Schulte dressed it at the builder’s production facility in nearby Douglas.
“Steve puts all my designs onto paper and then onto the boat,” Szolack said, then chuckled. “He’s painted every Skater I’ve built.”
Though Szolack has owned go-fast powerboats with purple in their paintjobs, the new 388 is his first from-the-ground-up build to incorporate the hue.
“Tom Cat, my 46 Skater, has a lot of purple in it,” he said. “But this is the first one I’ve built with purple.”
As it turns out, the colors Szolack chose are paying immediate benefits. Like all boats he acquires, the 388 is for sale. And he already has prospective buyers.
“I’ve already got a couple of guys on it,” he added, then laughed again. “Because their wives like the colors.”