Steve stands by custom rocket launchers he created for the owner.
C-FAB craftsmen work painstakingly by hand for a superior finish on all surfaces, joints and angles, for a seamless fit with CABOqualty.
There are, however, counterparts, particularly on the East Coast. "Pipe Welders is probably the most well-known name on the East Coast," says Steve. "They do the most volume. You could say they’re the ‘Pioneers of Tuna Towers.’ Our towers look a lot like theirs, but ours have distinctive little differences that make them unique, primarily up above in the sunshade. I like to put a lot of curves in my towers. I invented what I call the ‘cantilevered hardtop.’ It has no front legs and no support in the front. That seems to be the hot thing around here because it gives you a lot of visibility on the bridge. You can sit at the helm and not look through a bunch of pipes and stuff. That’s what most of the boats are getting, and the flybridge boats are getting hard tops."
"We have 28 employees. We have a custom fabrication division, we have a machine shop. For an aluminum tower, we can buy all the bases and hardware hinges to go with it, but when it comes to the stainless, there’s no such thing. We have to fabricate all our own bases and components, so we have a polishing shop in house. Everything’s done by hand, there’s nothing done by machine and it’s about three times the amount of work as it is to build an aluminum tower. With anodized aluminum, we buy the material free-anodized, polished and anodized - you just cut it, bend it and weld it, you’re done. With the stainless, we buy the material pre-polished, but it’s not to the level that we like it to be. We need a mirror-finish. So we have to bend it, cut it, polish it, then install it, then weld it, then polish the weld. So it’s a lot more work. The tower we just built on Mike Howarth’s boat involved 900 man hours. That was stainless steel with a fiberglass hardtop."
"Now they’re called ‘sportfishing yachts,’ instead of how they used to be called ‘sportfishers,’" says Steve. "They’re just not a boat anymore. We do molded flood lights and molded navigation lights and various options for electronics – antennas, mounting satellite domes, DSSs, radars. We mount them on the hardtops. Each boat is little different. There’s no such thing as a "stock top" anymore."
Steve says C-Fab is ready for anything .
"We’ll custom build anything anyone would want.
We’ve custom-built every component for a boat except the boat itself."
Mike Howarth’s extreme CABO 40 Express gets full dress stainless steel battle gear from C-FAB
Below
Small things like this rotating flag mast keep pendants from wrapping the staff.
Building
Towers
Of Excellence
The quality of a CABO is unmatched, anywhere in the world. There is no other production yacht builder who builds a better yacht.
But think about that for just a moment. For CABO quality to be as near-legendary as it is, every single vendor, supplier and product must be up to the same exacting standards. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. CABO quality must be inherent in every component, every system and every add-on, from stem to stern, from top to bottom.
The biggest add-on? The tower, of course, and if you’re taking delivery of your CABO on the West Coast, it’s likely getting a tower put on by C-Fab in Costa Mesa, California, courtesy of Steve DeGroote.
Steve says CABO Yachts has come a long way since 1991 when C-Fab designed and actually built all the rails for CABO Yachts for both their West Coast and East Coast boats. But Steve wanted to stay on the customization end of the business, and towers are a big part of his business.
"We build a lot of hard tops, both stainless steel and aluminum," says Steve. "We’re the only people in the world that I know of who actually build the stainless steel towers and hardtops. On the East Coast, anodized aluminum is the norm in rails and towers. On the West Coast, we prefer stainless steel. We prefer the rai ls to come all the way back and the outriggers to be mounted on the bridge because we go to the bow a lot.”
"Primarily for the striped marlin fishing. We cast live bait, on the West Coast, they don’t. We like to sit in our tower and look for marlin finning, kelp paddies and for life in the water – and that’s what towers are for – and once you find a fish, you run up to the bow and pull some bait out of your bow bait tank and toss it out in front of a marlin."
The East Coast/West Coast differences are interesting, to say the least.
"It’s a really weird thing about the East Coast and the West Coast," Steve notes . "We fish totally different. They troll dead bait. We prefer live bait. So in addition to building towers and hardtops, we build custom bait tanks. On the West Coast, we use a lot of tuna tubes. A lot of CABOs get modified and get tuna tubes added to their tanks."
Tuna tubes are tubes that sit vertically. You put the live tuna you catch inside. Water is pumped through to keep the fish alive. No one knows why and nobody can explain it, but when you put the tuna in these tubes,
which are black inside, the tuna seemingly go
"Now we don’t think they actually sleep," admits Steve, "but when you put them in these tubes, they stay real still. The tube is cone shaped at the bottom and when you put the tuna’s head in there, water is pumped through its gills. Then we take them to our favorite black or blue marlin area and put them back in the water and slow-troll them. You can use skipjack, tuna or just about any kind of bonita. I think this was started in Hawaii for the big black and blue marlin. It’s the big thing in Cabo San Lucas, so a lot of the people who are fishing tournaments down there are all l having tuna tubes put on their boats. Around here we use mackerel, so now there’s these little "mini-tubes" that we stick mackerel in with the same idea. A lot of guys will put them up on the bow so when they see a marlin they can yank it out and with the line already connected to it and toss it in the water."
C-Fab’s customization extends to every nook and cranny that an owner could specify. "Not only do we do towers and hardtops and bait tanks," says Steve, "we build little accessories, anything that the owners wants, like a hand rail by the salon door, additional rod holders, Steve. "When the CABO 35 was first designed, it had a plexiglass windshield in the front that angles forward on the flybridge. The popular thing on the East Coast now is white – everything is white, no stripes, the handrails are painted white, there’s no windshield, everything is just kinda plain-looking. So CABO eliminated their windshield on the 35s. On the West coast, a windshield is another thing the people like. It deflects the wind up, which is what it’s designed for. We produce the same windshields with railings inside of them so you can hang on to them when you’re in front of the bridge. We do those for the CABO 35, 40, 43 and 48.
That’s right – anything to customize a boat, whether it’s a 130-foot mega yacht or a CABO 35, we do high-end work that meets the quality of a CABO, because I think that CABO is one of the highest quality boats in the world."
Steve is proud of C-Fab’s work. "We set the standard around here for high-polish stainless. We do all the boats that go to Mexico , there are three or four boats that are going to Australia , we have three boats that are going to Japan . When they have aluminum rails, we build aluminum tops. But, about 75% of our product has been stainless steel and less aluminum. Now that people see the stainless steel towers, they want it. We did a CABO 45 that went to Los Suenos with a stainless steel tower and stainless really stands out. It’s shinier, it has teak on the ladder, it looks sharp. These are things that nobody else does."
The stern running light on this CABO 40 Express was custom mounted in the tower, out of the way and in a safer/higher location for navigation. BELOW: Nav lights are built into to sides of the top for a totally clean look.
Steve emphasizes that a tower is not something that you just install. It’s a process that can take two months or more, depending on timing. "Fortunately," Steve says, "with the CABOs, we know months in advance of when one is going to be delivered, because to build a full tower, it takes about an eight-week process. We like to have it ready for when the boat gets here, so it doesn’t have to wait another two months to get the tower on. But if a dealer has a boat in stock and a guy comes along and buys it, then he has to wait a little bit longer. Usually, there’s a waiting list to get a CABO, so it all works out good. However, occasionally one gets thrown in, and we also do custom work for other people, so we have to fit that in somehow. Once in a while the dealer will sell a boat out of the blue, that’s not on the schedule, or somebody will trade places on the schedule and the next thing I know, they call me up and say ‘We need a tower right away! I got a boat coming in four weeks!’ So we start working overtime."
Naturally, Steve gets to fish aboard quite a few CABOs. "I fished on a CABO 43 this weekend in a tournament. We took four out of nine trophies. The owner keeps his CABO like a show car. You could eat off the floor of the engine room. The boat is designed that way – has a polished liner in the engine room, chrome everywhere, you can see the detail in the wiring everywhere. To me, it’s like buying a show car.
