Last month (September 2025) I sold one of my beloved brands – Epic. Not because I had to but because I wanted to. It all started back in April of 2017 (you can read my original post on Twangled here). I flew down to Florida, rented a Uhaul truck, and drove a few hours southeast. My destination was to meet with Bobby from the company Trinity, the famous jet ski shop making Gen 2 X2 hulls known as the “Epic” (among others). This was a strategic acquisition for me, bridging my capacity of watercraft manufacturing capabilities across standups (Backie Chan, Havoc, Brawler), our new side-by-side runabout (Splashster), and this nice little sport generation 2 X-2 watercraft. The lineup was perfect, but the timing was not.
We had plans to bring to market a line of turnkey personal watercraft. From regular playful cruisers to flip skis. The freestyle ones were a glass/carbon hull that could flip with a 760. I had a Backie Chan built with a limited 760 and it was perfect. At the same time, I had also built the world’s first ‘build your own’ custom jet ski builder tool on FreestyleFactory. We were buying turnkey aftermarket Yamaha shortblocks when out of nowhere, I think that company was acquired (or went out of business), it was done. Either way, we could no longer buy a reasonably priced new shortblock, which destroyed the concept of a reasonably priced turnkey pwc. At this time, we pivot back to just making hulls.
After considerable delays catching up on freestyle hull orders, backlogged projects & a crazy tour schedule, we were finally moving forward with Gen 2 production by late 2019. No longer trying to build turnkey skis, just looking to make some great unique hulls while all the OEMs continued to build bigger & bigger jet skis (mini boats!). Before I knew it the world was shutting down from a thing called covid in early 2020 and boat manufacturing facilities, as it turns out, are not essential. We made enough parts for 2 hulls – but never assembled them. The Epic hulls never even got listed on our site for ordering. Very disappointing times.
Since then all the molds have been sitting (inside) in clean & temperature-controlled storage. I haven’t felt like selling anything, but also not planning to start manufacturing myself. As the resurgence for this classic ski grows, and I am not doing anything with it ~ I felt guilty and yes made some comments that I might be open to selling.
Long story short, after many conversations with Chris Steenbock, I am excited to share that C57Racing has acquired the intellectual property and rights to manufacture the former Trinity Epic. As a customer of C57racing, I am excited to have a shop with so much knowledge & experience taking over this project. I wasn’t planning to let it go, but when I saw the home it could go to, we found a way to make it happen. Congrats to Chris & his awesome wife Joselyn on this expansion. Please join me in supporting the C57Racing team on this project. The industry needs more shops to expand!!!
Celebration dinner!
