Bill Watters: Marine Manufacturing and Black Angus Cattle

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 433 — Bill Watters — Syntech Industries, Reflex marine flooring, and running a high-genetic black Angus cattle operation.

Building a High-Genetic Black Angus Operation

Tom Rowland: Alright, Bill. What's going on, man?

Bill Watters: Just work. That's all we need to do. I'm not working here — I'm working at the farm.

Tom Rowland: Well, that's what I understand. This is the first time we've been able to meet, but I've heard all kinds of stories about you running cattle. What all do you have going on at the farm?

Bill Watters: We're basically a high genetic registered black Angus seed stock operation. It separates you from being a commercial cattleman, because we do all AI or embryo transfer — we'll take embryos out of a high genetic animal and propagate her, put them in a lot of other females that become surrogate mothers. I started originally back in the nineties in the basic commercial cattle business, and about six years ago I threw my hands up and said I'm tired of this. I don't like people telling me what my animals are worth when it's just a commodity out there, and that's all you could ever get. So I decided to start doing something different, and we went after the black Angus side and started doing the high genetic line that people buy for their top end seed stock. If you're looking for the best marbling, the best whatever you're looking for in a steak, ultimately no matter what you produce it's going to end up in a steak, and you want to be the one that's in the steak and not in the McDonald's hamburger. I want to be the one producing the seed stock, so they come to me for it and I can tell them what I'm selling it to them for.

Tom Rowland: Right. So did you have to learn how to do that, or how did you identify that you were tired of doing what you were doing and decided to move into this?

Bill Watters: It's just another avenue of trying to get your value on a cattle to more than eighty cents or a dollar a pound. The other way, you're just selling by the pound. We're selling ours by the animal. This year we have about 65 bulls, and we'll probably castrate 15 to 20 of them — that's the only 15 or 20 in our whole herd that'll go toward beef. The rest will either become recip mamas or seed stock that we sell to somebody, and the bulls all get sold off as breeding bulls.

Tom Rowland: How much land do you have to support that operation?

Bill Watters: Between the cows, the calves we're raising up to a year old, and the bulls we're raising up to a year or two, we run about 400 cows on about 375 acres.

Tom Rowland: Wow. And what do those cows eat most of their life — grass?

Bill Watters: A lot of grass. Most of our beef is grass-fed, but in the grass-fed program you can still put up to ten percent grain or corn in to give them the energy they need to make it through the cold days in wintertime. Most of all our feed, except for the corn we bring in or the creep feed for the calves, is produced right there on the farm. We rented the first little patch next to us — about 30 acres — from a friend who wanted to do something with it, and I told him if he'd let me have it for six to eight years I'd put an alfalfa field on it. We planted it this past fall and it's growing at a pretty good rate now. We'll probably get our first cutting in May, and once you start cutting alfalfa, it's every thirty days — once it blooms to a certain point it has to be cut or it'll die out.

Tom Rowland: When you bring in 30 acres like that, how do you adjust your operation to be able to cut it every thirty days? Is that you doing that?

Bill Watters: We have one full-time and one part-time guy, plus my wife and I. Saturday and Sunday we're pretty much working on equipment or doing different things on the farm — I spent all day Sunday spraying the alfalfa field. It's Roundup Ready alfalfa, so you can spray over it to kill the weeds, and you want to get those out the first year and keep the grasses from growing. We spread about 17 tractor-trailer loads of chicken litter on it — we hired somebody with a spreader truck to come in for that.

Tom Rowland: Is that like where I go turkey hunting — they're spreading cow manure?

Bill Watters: Similar, but we don't get enough of that to justify it. We still have to spread some commercial fertilizer too, because we have neighbors who don't like that smell sometimes.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, everybody wants natural until you're living right next door to it.

Bill Watters: In reality, we also work with a company called Synagro — it's the sludge that comes out of the human waste treatment plants. They've got to spread it somewhere, so they spread it across our farm on a schedule, and we stay off of it for about the next forty-five days. It gets rained in, works just like chicken litter, and doesn't smell that bad — it's already composted and been through all the heat, so it doesn't have any germs left in it. But you will get seeds that sprout. All of a sudden you'll look out in a field and have tomatoes growing everywhere.

Tom Rowland: That's funny, man. So that whole operation sounds like an every-weekend deal for you and your wife.

Family, Telluride, and Western Rise

Tom Rowland: And you've got kids — did they work on all this when they were around? Are they grown and gone now?

Bill Watters: They're young — I mean, they did when they were young, but my kids are up and gone now. My son lives in Colorado, my daughter lives in Alabama.

Tom Rowland: Your boy in Colorado — you were telling me he's a big-time fisherman. Where is he?

Bill Watters: Telluride. Beautiful place. There's good fishing around there, but he ended up moving there — he was working here at Syntech with me. When he got out of college he went to Beavercreek for a few years as a ski instructor, and that's when he started guiding fishing on the side. He figured his knees weren't going to make it forever as a ski instructor, so he came back to work here with me at Syntech for about three years while starting a company on the side. Then he packed it up and went through one of those accelerator programs that teach you how to get a company started and growing quickly — that's how he ended up in Telluride, and he never came back.

Tom Rowland: What was the company he was starting through that program?

Bill Watters: Western Rise — high-technical-fabric outdoor clothing. He started out aiming mainly toward fly fishing, then realized that's a pretty narrow niche and expanded into shirts and pants. Probably the biggest thing he's done is the Evolution pants — you may have seen those. It's all sold through westernrise.com, one portal on the internet.

Tom Rowland: And that little business incubator he did — did he learn a lot from it that he still uses every day?

Bill Watters: He said he learned more doing that than he would have learned getting his master's. His main mentor during it was the guy who started Mountain Khakis, and he also worked closely with a guy from Patagonia. So he had a lot of good mentors going through it, and now he works for himself full time doing the clothing company and guiding.

Tom Rowland: Man, Telluride — what a great place. I took my boy skiing there for his senior trip, and the way that whole mountain is set up, you don't need a car — you ride the gondola to the grocery store.

Bill Watters: That's where I have to stay, at the bottom, because of the altitude. It's a very high place — it makes me sick. Throw-up sick. It usually hits me in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and once I get through about twelve hours of that, I'm fine. My son lives on Mid Mountain, at 9,500 feet. What a great place to live, for him.

Tom Rowland: That little town — if you were going to pick a Western town to hold up as the ideal little place, that's one of the better ones. They've done a good job of not having any chain stores — they kept the town very similar to what it was. It's the same way with Key West — that old area called Old Town, where rich people buy these old gingerbread houses, and you can't just tear one down and build something else.

Bill Watters: They're waiting on the next hurricane though, aren't they? There's another old town we drive to — Apalachicola. They kept the high-rises and new homes out on Saint George, but Apalachicola itself is still the old rustic town, really neat.

Tom Rowland: Old Florida. It got beat up some by that storm — Michael — that came through.

Bill Watters: Mexico Beach, thirty miles away, was washed away. If you want to build a house that'll make it through a storm like that —

Tom Rowland: Well, that's now how everybody has to build a house. When we have hurricanes in the Keys, you can see old construction and new construction side by side — the new construction has virtually nothing wrong with it, and the old construction, the whole roof is gone. The code keeps getting better and better.

Bill Watters: We were down in Apalachicola last year and it's come a long way.

Tom Rowland: What do you like to do down there — fish?

Bill Watters: Carp fishing — that's my saltwater fishing down there. We fish with a couple of guides, Brad and Junior, depending on whether we're fly fishing or red fishing with a spinning rod.

Fly Fishing Roots and a First Fish in Yellowstone

Tom Rowland: What's your background in fly fishing?

Bill Watters: I started with my father-in-law about thirty years ago, played around with it, and eventually my son got into it and got better than I did — as a fishing guide he was able to get all the equipment we needed, so we're pretty well set up for fly fishing salt or fresh water now.

Tom Rowland: What do you prefer?

Bill Watters: Fresh. Come over to my office and you'll see why — we're in Rome, Georgia, and around here some of the biggest trout in the world aren't far away. In the summer, a lot of the fly fishing is running the Etowah out of Altoona for striper, and up toward Clayton you can find some pretty good trout — if you get a twenty-incher up there, you've done well.

Tom Rowland: There's also where my friend Will Taylor guides, up toward the headwaters of the Toccoa in North Georgia — some of the biggest trout in the world up there. He's been on the podcast a bunch of times, and it's a fun time fishing with him. People say those are just pellet pigs, but I don't think they are — I've been to plenty of places where they feed trout in a river and they don't get that size. There's some magic in that North Georgia water combined with the feeding and the genetics.

Tom Rowland: I grew up bluegill and bass fishing with my dad in Chattanooga, mostly with spinning rods — I didn't do much bait casting. Later I got interested in fly fishing and went to work at Yellowstone National Park for a summer, and that did it. There's a story I tell about walking down the Yellowstone River from the Hamilton store at Fishing Bridge, along the Howard Eaton Trail, where everyone else was fishing the other bank because the river was too deep to cross early season. I was fishing alone, and from a high bank I saw a fish for pretty much the first time in my life — the water was so clear it looked like it was floating in the air. I flopped a terrible cast out there with a horrible fly I'd tied, and the thing ate it. That was the moment — people ask me when I knew what I wanted to do, and that's it. I didn't care if I had to live under a bridge; I was plenty happy cleaning toilets at Yellowstone for the rest of my life. That was the first time I ever made money as a fisherman.

Bill Watters: I wonder if you were wandering around there in the wintertime — I've been out there a couple of times in the winter on a snowmobile, back before all the restrictions they have now. Coming out of West Yellowstone up toward the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, they'd just started clearing the road for spring, and you're riding along the bumpers with a fifteen-foot drop to the pavement below. We had to fuel up once to make the whole track — there was a hole cut in the snow with a rope, and you'd climb down, put your credit card in the gas pump, tie the handle to the rope, and the guy at the top would pull it up and fuel the machine and lower it back down. Never seen anything like it — the hole was about even with the awning above the gas station.

Tom Rowland: I remember taking my kids out there for their first experience of the West — apparently it was a good introduction, because both my boys live out there now, in Bozeman, Montana. We went over Dunraven Pass right after it opened one May, with twenty feet of snow on each side of the road. We had this amazing experience where a wolf crossed the road right in front of us and went down into the woods — we waited a bit, then got out to look at the footprint, which was the size of a plate. All three of my kids remember that like it was yesterday — thinking that's the same species as the dog living in our house, but it weighs a hundred thirty pounds and has a foot the size of a plate.

Bill Watters: I was down in the Gallatin area, near the turn up to Big Sky, for a wedding one time. We got there a few days early and did some fishing, and one day my wife and I went hiking and had to cut through one of Ted Turner's farms to get to a trail on another mountain. I remember thinking, why would Ted Turner put a big statue of an elk out here — it was huge, beautiful antlers — and then it jumped the road. I couldn't believe it.

Tom Rowland: Ted Turner has accumulated an incredible amount of land out there — some of the finest land anyone could hope for.

Bill Watters: He's done well in New Mexico too — he's got about 200,000 acres that connects with Philmont, the Boy Scout ranch. He lets the Boy Scouts cut trails and backpack through it — hopefully they'll continue to have the 160,000 acres or so there, depending on what happens with the lawsuit they've got going on.

Boy Scouts, Philmont, and the Appalachian Trail

Tom Rowland: What a weird situation that is — somebody just let something get out of hand. I don't know what the future of the Boy Scouts is, but it sure wouldn't be a good thing if they didn't make it.

Bill Watters: I was an Eagle Scout, and then a Scoutmaster for ten years — that was before they let girls into the Boy Scouts. I keep thinking about how in the world I was a scoutmaster with half the kids in tents being girls at fifteen years old. It makes no sense to me. Boy Scouts are for boys.

Tom Rowland: I wasn't a scout myself, but a lot of my friends were, some Eagle Scouts like you. It always seemed like Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts diverged into different missions rather than a boy version and girl version of the same thing — and I can see why some girls would want in on the Boy Scouts, because they get to go to Philmont and hike and camp.

Bill Watters: We took our boys to the high adventure base in Maine — there's also one down in the Keys, and one in Minnesota in the Boundary Waters, though they ended up having to close the Maine base, probably back in the early nineties, because they weren't getting enough people through it. It's a shame — it's really neat there. We had two crews; I took the younger crew, and another scoutmaster took the older crew, who got to walk Mount Katahdin, the northern end of the Appalachian Trail.

Tom Rowland: We've had a bunch of Appalachian Trail through-hikers on the podcast, including a guy who took his family of eight, including a two-year-old, the entire trail — and when they got to Katahdin, the rangers wouldn't let the two-year-old go up. After 2,000 miles, minus a half mile, they still wouldn't let them finish. That guy also managed and participated in a professional blackjack card-counting team, which was a fascinating conversation — how they count cards, how they spot each other, how you can sit for hours without betting and then bet big when the count turns in your favor.

Syntech Industries: From Marine Carpet to a Diversified Manufacturer

Tom Rowland: Everybody's got a backstory like yours with the cattle — that's a lot of time and energy on top of running this business, Syntech. How long have you had this?

Bill Watters: I started Syntech in '86. We literally started with that first product line right there — carpet, marine carpet for boats. As we grew, the first real downturn came in '89–'90, and I didn't like the taste of one product in one market, so we started looking at other markets. We ended up going into RV through van conversions, and at one point we were making carpet for twelve to fifteen hundred vans a year — that included Choo Choo Customs, up the highway here, which was big-time back then. They'd take a new van, pull out all the seats, put in new ones, and that was the whole product.

Tom Rowland: I remember those vans growing up in Chattanooga — Choo Choo Customs was a big deal. You'd get a Suburban and they'd redo the whole interior.

Bill Watters: That's Eclipse van conversions — I got mine back in 2000, sight unseen, twenty-one years ago now, with 467,000 miles on it today.

Tom Rowland: You drive a truck with 467,000 miles on it every day? Why not get something new?

Bill Watters: A truck doesn't really change a whole lot, does it? I've got the electric windows, hot and cold cup holders, even a TV in it — in its day, this was a fancy truck. It was a demo unit for a customer of mine, and I called him wanting one, and he had one with about 8,000 miles on it. I asked what color — he said white, and I said no thanks, because down here with the red clay, white doesn't work when the tires throw mud up. He said he'd been needing to paint one anyway, so he painted it and I got it sight unseen.

Tom Rowland: What would it take for you to decide you wanted a new truck?

Bill Watters: Half a million more miles. I'm too close now to stop at anything less — I'll probably go to half a million, get a new one, and put this one on the farm. We're the same way with tractors — driving ones with seven or eight thousand hours on them that still run like a champ. We just clean them up, put on new tops, headliners, and seats, and hope they'll go another five years.

Tom Rowland: So back to Syntech — you didn't like one product in one market, so you started branching out.

Bill Watters: Right — we got into RV first, and the van conversion market crashed big time, going from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a day down to near nothing. Part of it was that vans no longer needed high tops, because the reason for the high top was to house the TV, and once flat-screen TVs came out, they could mount those on the back of seats or flip them off the ceiling — and the GMs and Fords started classing up their own vans to compete. It wiped the conversion business out; there are still two or three companies doing it, but a very small amount now. What's hot now is people taking an old Bronco and refurbishing it like new — we put some of our Reflex foam product into some of those Bronco builds, since you're taking the top off and it's going to get rained on.

Tom Rowland: That seems like a perfect application. Do you ever make floor mats for cars or trucks?

Bill Watters: Not really — some of it goes into UTVs and golf carts. With the RV side, at that time we were still nothing but carpet, just a different interior kind, until the late nineties when we'd grown to seventy-five-plus percent market share of carpet going into boats and couldn't grow much more. So we moved into upholstery vinyls — the seat vinyl you have on your boat — and kept branching from there. In 2008, during the downturn, we picked up a product out of Belgium called Beauflor that goes into RVs and manufactured housing, and we expanded into manufactured housing. We also picked up a steering wheel company in Tregnago, Italy, becoming the majority owner nine months after we met the guy, because he didn't have any money. We grew it from a small company coming out of bankruptcy into the largest steering wheel supplier in the marine industry, and we're getting more and more into the side-by-side and golf cart market too — we'll do well over 100,000 wheels this year, probably close to 150,000, about two-thirds of that still boats.

Tom Rowland: The by-side market is incredible, and you've got all these golf-cart communities too.

Bill Watters: Places like the Villages in Florida — there'll be 10,000 carts in a single community, and we sell a lot of product into them.

Reflex Foam Flooring and the Growth of a New Category

Tom Rowland: What about the foam floor — Reflex?

Bill Watters: My son dragged us into that when he was working here, and we're doing Reflex mainly into boats now, with some going into the UTV and side-by-side cart market. There's a lot of potential for growth left. Our plant for that is up in Chatsworth — it happened to be an empty building when we put this last move together. We bought a company out of the Keys called Exact because they had a digitizing process we didn't have, which lets me go onto your boat, take ten pictures, come back, digitize it, and send you mats that fit perfectly every time. We have our own routers, and we do special things like our True Grain process, setting the product together to make it a lot tougher than anybody else's — that's been the biggest problem with the competition in this category, the wearability isn't great since it's foam. Ours wears very differently. What you have on your boat is much harder than the competition — harder and easier to clean. Ours is a 140 durometer; theirs is around 80. That means we've got a lot more mass in the product, which helps with wearability, but it's really the True Grain process, which is confidential, that gives it the best performance. We test it constantly and document it for customers — we'll be showing a video tomorrow to one of the marine industry buying groups proving this product is the best of the best. Not the cheapest, but the best.

Tom Rowland: You've unknowingly got the best field tester known to man — my partner Rich. Put it on his boat and that guy could tear up an anvil, and anything I've ever left there never comes back the same.

Bill Watters: If he's ever had our competition's product on a boat, he'd know the difference. We did a boat called Surreal — a 53-foot Hydra-Sport a guy commercially fishes with. He'd had our competitor's product on there before and had to change it out every year; we're going on our third year with ours and it's as good as the day we put it down, he says.

Tom Rowland: That says a lot. I like fishing on it — it's quieter, easier on your back, especially in a skiff.

Bill Watters: What you were pointing at a minute ago might be the new mat system we're working on, taking the same Reflex and adhering it to a thick PVC backing we call our ridge line — it gives it weight and resilience so it stays in place better without sticking it down permanently, though we still make you put snaps in it, because at twenty or sixty miles an hour you don't want a mat catching air like a sail and flying up at you.

Tom Rowland: I see even bass fishermen going with the foam flooring now, with logos routed in like you did for us.

Bill Watters: We do have a laser machine, but most of what you're looking at is routed in. The process is that ours is PE, polyethylene foam — you put the PE product into the mold, it blows, and it has a slick top and bottom skin, like a cake with a crust. We made our top and bottom skin into the actual finished surface rather than cutting it away, so it makes that hard mold layer. Think about it — how many bass fishermen have their shoes off while fishing, or their boots on in the wintertime? That skin can take it; you're not going to hurt that stuff. The impact pattern, which is laser cut, gives incredible grip — you'll never slip on it.

Tom Rowland: I like that pattern a lot — it's got a nice clean look but such good grip.

Bill Watters: I wish you could've seen it in person on a boat before COVID hit, back in April, as you remember.

Surviving COVID: Reinventing the Boat Show

Tom Rowland: I consider it March 12 — that was the day the NBA shut down, and I remember not believing it when a friend told me. That's when I knew this thing was different than I thought.

Bill Watters: I consider it the day the governor sent everybody home. When you bring a company of 700 people to its knees and there's about ten of us left standing around staring at each other, you know it's for real, and I'm not one who does well just going home and saying we'll be back whenever we can. Eight of us stayed around the office to make sure everything that needed to function still functioned. I sat there thinking, like we did back in '08 when things got bad, about what I was going to do to get out of this mess — and it hit me that we weren't going to have IBEX that year, the International Boat Builders Exhibition and Conference, where we have a pretty big booth, forty by eighty feet. I kept thinking about it, and around May, when it was clear we needed to act, I sat down with our national sales manager and some other people and said, here's my idea. We took this piece of real estate right out here — what I call the most wasted piece of real estate in Rome, Georgia, this huge lobby within a lobby — and turned it into an expanded showroom, with three scaled-down boats leaning against the far wall, one of them covered entirely in our impact pattern. We had a section for Reflex, a vinyl wall, our sensation wall, all our steering wheels, and consoles.

Tom Rowland: So that was kind of a virtual boat show — you all put on your own?

Bill Watters: No — we literally flew customers in on a private plane. We sanitized the plane every day, picked people up, brought them here, had everyone masked up and sanitized. Syntech's known for the peanuts we send out every Christmas, so we had individual packs of peanuts, and everything at lunchtime was wrapped up. We had customers here anywhere from four to seven hours at a stretch, all day long, and then we did the same thing in the RV world at our showroom in Goshen, Indiana, which we'd already started cleaning up and expanding. We also ran a traveling version for the manufactured housing side, where we went to the customer instead. As far as we know, nobody caught COVID from us.

Tom Rowland: That's wild — what a weird year. So many people suffered financially and lost their jobs or businesses, but others did really well.

Bill Watters: Boats and RVs did well. People needed to get outside — cancel your trip somewhere else, and spend time on the lake next door instead.

Life in Italy and the Steering Wheel Plant

Bill Watters: Italy's talking about locking everything down again through Easter — they've got an older population than we do. Before COVID, I was in Italy about six to eight times a year for our steering wheel plant.

Tom Rowland: Do you like Italy, going that often?

Bill Watters: After that many trips, it's not fun getting on that plane for eleven, eleven and a half hours even nonstop in summer. It's pretty tough duty. We're up in a pretty area, the Valpolicella wine region near Verona — the steering wheel plant is in a town called Tregnago.

Tom Rowland: Did the steering wheel business start there because of cars — Italy's known for nice sports cars?

Bill Watters: That zone of Italy is to steering wheels what Dalton, Georgia is to carpet, and Elkhart, Indiana is to RVs — you get all these people servicing each other in one place. It started with the Ferraris and that kind of car needing nice wheels, and the whole ecosystem grew up around it — somebody does the urethane, somebody does the leather wrapping, somebody does the aluminum cut. Today we do all our own leather wrapping and urethane ourselves, but we still send the stainless components out to be poured, either there or in China, in what they call the casting region about two and a half hours from us — the same zone where Beretta and Benelli are made. You'll walk through the plant and see our steering wheels coming down one line and guns coming down the next.

Tom Rowland: That must be where the craftsmen just keep getting better and better until that little area becomes the best in the world — like Italian firearms.

Bill Watters: The plant where we do our steering wheels is where Beretta, Benelli, and Sabatti all come from.

Tom Rowland: I've got a Beretta I bought my son as a youth gun — he shot that thing until he was 21, wouldn't trade it for anything bigger. And we've all got the Benelli Montefeltro now, my favorite shotgun.

Bill Watters: I've got some of the Super Black Eagles — I like the way their slug barrels hook on. You can take the whole thing apart, and the scope stays connected to the slug barrel, so you put the bird barrel on to go bird hunting, then swap to the slug barrel for deer without having to re-sight anything.

Tom Rowland: That's a real multi-use gun — turkey hunt, duck hunt, slug barrel for deer, all in the same day.

Quail, Coyotes, and the Trouble with Hogs

Tom Rowland: What's your favorite kind of hunting?

Bill Watters: I loved quail hunting growing up, but we don't have the quail anymore.

Tom Rowland: Where did you grow up — here in Rome, and you had wild quail here?

Bill Watters: Big time. My dad used to hunt quail in Chattanooga, Tennessee too, and they were up there as well. The ones in South Georgia now are mainly planted birds — kicking-shoot birds, I call them. There's still some wild quail here — I heard one whistling just yesterday — but not like there used to be. A lot of it goes back to the chemicals they used on cotton, and also the coyotes we didn't have growing up.

Tom Rowland: I never saw a coyote growing up either.

Bill Watters: They just wipe things out. We have one place on the farm my wife calls Rabbit Hill, where you'll see rabbits, and then all of a sudden you don't see them anymore — that's the coyotes cleaning them out. Rabbits replenish quick, but coyotes are a real problem, and they're everywhere.

Tom Rowland: They're a really interesting, almost survivalist animal — if you start shooting some out of a den, they'll scatter and send out mating pairs in every direction to rebuild the population.

Bill Watters: Bring their population down twenty percent and they'll produce that much more the next year to get back to where they need to be. We have to trap them out for the cattle, because they'll come after cattle, especially during calving season with all the afterbirth smell around — a baby calf that isn't doing well the first day or two, and that's it. Once they get a taste of it you'd better get to killing them. We mainly use leg traps, and you've got to be super careful about scent, put dirt on it, some stinky bait. Our biggest predator problem, though, has been wild hogs — somebody brought them in, because we'd never seen sign of them and then all of a sudden we were eaten up with them. They breed like coyotes, four litters a year with eight to twelve piglets each. Over two years we trapped and killed about seventy of them using one of those trap-door pens we saw at the Sunbelt Ag Expo, and we've mostly gotten them off our place — we rarely see sign of a male anymore.

Tom Rowland: What do you think somebody's motivation was to bring them in?

Bill Watters: Deer season overlaps with hog season, so it's just something else to hunt — they'd send them up from Florida, turn them loose, and next thing you know they're all over the place and running the rivers.

Tom Rowland: What do they actually do to a farm that's damaging?

Bill Watters: They root — like taking a big tiller straight through your fields, destroying them. You can't hardly drive a tractor across it when they're done, and you basically have to plow it up and replant everything. It doesn't hurt the cattle directly, but it's competition for grass the cattle can't get to, and if you can't get a tractor across the field, that's a real problem.

Deer Season and a Slow Recovery

Bill Watters: I love deer hunting, but I don't do it as much as I used to since I've had some health issues that kept me from climbing a tree for a while. This last year my new son-in-law got me back into it, and I got a nice one this year.

Tom Rowland: New son-in-law — how new, and how's that going?

Bill Watters: About two years in now. Good — at least I've got a hunting buddy out of it, even though he's only four hours away. We've got plenty of deer, too many really.

Tom Rowland: How do you manage your deer population?

Bill Watters: We need to take off maybe twenty does this year, and we only shoot big deer — ten points or a spread wider than fifteen inches. I accidentally shot an eight-point this year with a nineteen-inch spread, just because I thought it was bigger than it was, and thirty minutes later the deer I actually wanted walked by, but I'd already committed. We got a couple of trail cameras this time, but honestly I've maybe looked at the pictures twice — I just don't have time for that. I know what we've got just from driving the farm every day.

Tom Rowland: Do you get many turkeys?

Bill Watters: I think we've got more turkey in our area than dove now. I came around a hill on the farm one day and there were at least twenty turkeys standing in an old hundred-foot concrete feed trough we use for the cattle — I laughed so hard I had to call the guy who works the farm, because nobody would believe it. I wouldn't ever let somebody hunt over that feed trough, though — that's not sportsmanlike.

Tom Rowland: I like turkey hunting — it's a lot like permit fishing to me, both animals that make you work for it.

Bill Watters: I love turkey hunting, but it's the wrong time of year for me — that's cutting hay season, weaning calves, tattooing and vaccinating, bringing up herds and setting them up for embryo work. It's one thing after another.

Tom Rowland: How do you manage your time with all of that going on?

Bill Watters: Some people manage twenty-four hours a lot better than others. My wife will tell you the smile came back on my face this past Sunday with daylight savings — I could get home and have some actual time in the afternoon. Come November when it switches back to standard time, it's dark before I get home, and I hate it.

The Daylight Saving Time Debate

Tom Rowland: There's talk about not switching the clocks anymore.

Bill Watters: There's talk of only having daylight savings time permanently — in Georgia, the state House voted for standard time and the Senate voted for daylight saving, so it's still up in the air.

Tom Rowland: Do you know the actual origin of it? I always heard it had something to do with school children not wanting to go to school or come home in the dark, though it doesn't fully make sense either way you flip it.

Bill Watters: Right now it's getting light around seven in the morning and staying light until eight or eight-fifteen at night. By June 21, the longest day, it'll stay light until 9:30 or ten — it's nice, you can get a lot done, go fishing even in the evening. Imagine living in Alaska.

Alaska, Rainbows, and 3 A.M. Daylight

Tom Rowland: I was there in the summertime, June or July, and it was pretty far north — but when I went to Canada pike fishing for the first time at a place called Reindeer Lake, it was so far north it barely got dusk before it started getting light again.

Bill Watters: We used to fish near Lake Iliamna — I've been there ten times or more. The first time I went was in October, and you'd have to quit fishing to fly back and land before dark, since there are no streetlights out there and it gets truly dark. You could feel time changing fast at that point in the season, because by December 21 it's dark all day. But I found I loved going on June 8 — opening day — when you're right against the solstice and getting full daylight. I remember sitting out on a wall by the lake at ten at night with a beer, and it's like it's four in the afternoon. When customers came in, I'd hand each one a handful of clothespins for the drapes, because even though the rooms had blackout curtains, one little crack of light and it was like daylight in the room. If you got up in the middle of the night, you'd look out the window trying to figure out if it was closer to morning, because it still looked like a cloudy afternoon — that only lasted about two hours before it was five a.m. and full daylight again, time to go fishing.

Tom Rowland: The first time we went way up north, I was a senior in high school, and I caught my first pike and ran up to show my dad at three in the morning. He was half asleep saying, you're fishing right now? I said yeah, it's light out, we're killing them.

Bill Watters: What I loved about June up there is you're mostly dry-fly and streamer fishing before the salmon come up to spawn — after that, everybody switches to bead fishing, drifting a bead up and down the river, which never thrilled me as much. Before the salmon arrive, the rainbows act just like regular trout, eating hatches on a dry fly, and there's nothing more exciting than hooking a thirty-incher on a dry fly, sometimes even a mouse pattern. Probably the most exciting day I ever had up there was about four years ago with my son. He said he wanted to fish with just me that day instead of with the customers, so we told our big customer we'd be fine on our own and headed out toward the Copper River in heavy fog. I said we're not going in with fog like that in the valleys, but the guide, Willie, wanted to try to sneak under it. I said I'm not playing that game — I'll just fish from the lodge. Sure enough he came back and said he was going to refuel and try again, and this time we went with him, along with another guide who could speak barely any English. We lowered the raft over a cliff at a falls, worked our way into a lagoon, fished it hard, then pushed on and machete-cut into a second lagoon nobody had touched — we caught everything from ten to twenty pounds, most fish two or three times over, just pounding them all afternoon. At lunch under a shade tree, a big one rolled right behind us — I grabbed a wood chopper lure, made a couple of pulls, and it struck. I set my foot on the rod so it wouldn't get pulled away, grabbed my other rod rigged with a long-A Bomber, threw it out, made three pulls, and he nailed that one too — a nineteen-pounder that day.

Tom Rowland: Is there anything better than a wood chopper? I've got an old tackle box full of lures like that from my grandfather — the ones with propellers on front are perfect for peacock bass.

Bill Watters: Those peacocks will destroy them. I've got one mounted in my office, along with a nice rainbow.

Peacock Bass in Venezuela and Brazil

Tom Rowland: Any other trips that really stick out in your memory?

Bill Watters: Probably one was a peacock bass trip — the first time I ever went, to Venezuela, and I said never again. It was very, very rustic, and just about all of us got sick — we got stuck for a while in a town called San Carlos de Rio Negro, where they wouldn't even let us into the boats at first, with guys pointing machine guns around, before they finally let us go. We must have picked up whatever it was from the food in that town.

Tom Rowland: Anybody get sick? I know a lot of people who've gone down there, and everybody does — the water's terrible.

Bill Watters: I got talked into going back after that, into Brazil, and we had some great fishing. We used to stay on the Amazon Queen.

Tom Rowland: I remember that boat — I always wanted to take that trip, dreamed about it from the magazines.

Bill Watters: That particular trip we flew beyond where we'd always gone before, past a town called Marcellus, all the way to San Isabel, and when we landed the Queen was stuck on a rock in the river — nobody had bothered to tell us before we got there. We fished one day and barely caught anything, and I came back raising cane, figuring the water around a stuck boat had been fished to death. I told them I wanted to go back on the tributaries the next day, past where they'd already fished it out. They loaded two extra cans of gas into the boat and sent another boat along because they knew I wasn't happy, and we got back into some incredible wildlife and fishing — macaws everywhere, unbelievable. I hooked a good one near a fallen tree, the guide sent the other angler to the same spot and he hooked one too, and we landed both at the boat at the same time — mine was half a pound heavier, his was half an inch longer, both over twenty-four pounds, just from what they'd eaten that day.

Tom Rowland: What happened when you got back to the lodge with everybody else wanting to go where you'd found them?

Bill Watters: They weren't happy — there's only so much gas. That's the pattern at a lot of these lodges: all the guides have the same boats and horsepower, so there's a bubble around the lodge everybody fishes every day, and if you're willing to pay for extra gas to get outside that bubble, it's game on. The first year we ever went, we were out fishing around three in the afternoon and the guide started up a creek, cutting through with a machete. I thought, what are we doing? We pushed the boat through into a lagoon on the other side and fished maybe ten minutes before he said we had to head back to make our curfew. I told him we needed to come back to this exact spot the next day — he said he didn't know where that was, but I said the other guide did. Sure enough the next day he claimed not to speak English and took us right back to that same lagoon, then kept cutting through to another one beyond it, and we hammered fish there — never anything over twenty pounds, but constant action from ten to twenty, most fish caught two or three times.

The Future of Boat Flooring

Tom Rowland: One thing I wanted to ask — as you're making the foam flooring for bass boats with logos routed in, and competition in that category is growing, do you see that becoming the standard look for all boats going forward, or does carpet still have a place?

Bill Watters: Not all, but carpet has been disappearing since the wave after '08. What's replacing it in a lot of cases is a woven PVC product we call Sensation — you see it on all the pontoons and even some bass boats now. The foam flooring is great for it, but the boat builder has to fully finish the deck lid underneath before you can lay it down — you can't just leave a black unfinished lid and wrap over it. That's the way saltwater center-console boats already do it, with proper fit and finish, no carpet at all. But bass boats aren't built that way yet, so there's some resistance from manufacturers, since finishing the top and sides of every hatch is a big deal. A lot of center-console builders just push the boat through unfinished and let the aftermarket handle the flooring, which actually works out fine for the customer, since they get to choose exactly what they want with their own logos.

Tom Rowland: The next one I get is going to be the impact pattern — I love the grip, especially against sunscreen on the deck, which gets slick as anything once it hits water. Have you ever put this material on the side of a pool?

Bill Watters: Not yet — it only comes in forty-by-eighty-inch sheets right now, technology hasn't gotten us to a bigger format yet, but we're working on something that could come in roll form, maybe eight and a half feet wide.

Tom Rowland: That would make a great gym floor too, with a little more cushion than the rolled rubber gyms use now — almost like a wrestling mat.

Bill Watters: We're pushing in that direction, though COVID slowed us down, because most PE foam like this comes out of Vietnam and it's been tough to build or communicate with our supplier there. We're actually talking with them now about putting a foam plant here in the U.S. This is the same type of foam used in ski boots, so those suppliers already do a ton of business into that market, and I think they'll do a lot more going into boats — a boot's only so big, but you could do a whole boat deck at once. It's cool having this whole display here, because you can put your hands on it and feel the differences in firmness between the products.

Health Scares and Bouncing Back

Bill Watters: Let me send you some bumper pads too — we put a softer foam in the midsection and a harder layer on the outside, since you're going to get banged up between boats otherwise. That really shows you what the product can do.

Tom Rowland: Well, we've got a lot of boats in the water, we'll definitely put those to use. I really enjoyed getting to know you, man — you're an interesting guy. What impresses me most is how you manage your time, cramming so much into twenty-four hours.

Bill Watters: I like to. This morning I was up at 4:45 to go to the gym, which I do Tuesdays and Thursdays. I used to also get up and walk, but that changed after some health issues and a hip replacement last October. The hip wasn't too bad, since I was already in decent shape when it hit — they cut on me at eight in the morning and I was home by five that afternoon, walking that same day, back at work a week later, and back in the gym six weeks later.

Tom Rowland: My dad had his hip replaced a while back, and it didn't go quite as smoothly, though it did fine for him overall — he's 83, had a knee and a hip done, and the knee went better than the hip.

Bill Watters: Mine started as what I thought was a pinched nerve or pulled muscle in my backside, and I just kept moving with it, favoring it some, until it got to where a friend at the gym could tell just from how I was walking up a hill that something was wrong. I went to the doctor, who works out with me the same days, and he told me to come in for an X-ray. He gave me a shot that lasted about two weeks, and I had to beg him for another one because we were starting a big show — I told him I couldn't do the surgery until October once the season settled down. He agreed, but said that was it, we had to schedule it. That last week before the show, working through it, I was hurting bad. I got it done that October, and by the time I got back from a trip to Indiana I was already going at it again in the gym.

Tom Rowland: What do you do at the gym?

Bill Watters: Something different every time — kind of a cross between CrossFit and calisthenics. It's an old-fart group, I call it, most of us have been going to the same place for twenty-plus years, on about the third or fourth trainer to run it. It makes such a difference having that group.

Tom Rowland: I've got a group I work out with too, and it becomes such a big part of your life — friends, support, accountability, the whole thing.

Bill Watters: One of them texted me last week that they were moving the vaccine eligibility down to age 55 that Monday, and I got it done right then — one and done, no second shot needed like the others. Some of the muscles felt fatigued and sore for a couple of days afterward, which they said to expect, but that's it.

Tom Rowland: And that's supposed to give you longer-lasting immunity, like an old-school vaccine rather than needing a booster right away?

Bill Watters: That's what they told me — maybe a booster down the road someday, but the messenger RNA ones work differently, changing how your body responds at a genetic level, and I didn't want something messing with that if I had a choice.

Bill Watters: I'm fat even though I go to the gym, and the odd part is that everywhere I've had surgery, it's soft and mushy with scar tissue underneath. I had a colon burst a few years back and went very, very septic — almost died.

Tom Rowland: Really? It's hard to come back from being septic.

Bill Watters: Very sick. I was in the hospital four days the first time, and then my colon burst on April Fools' Day, the Saturday of Easter weekend three years ago. I'd gotten up early to mix a bottle for a calf, and while just walking out to the driveway it felt like somebody had shot me — I had to raise my arms just to get air into my lungs, it hurt so bad. I handed off the bottle, went and took a shower hoping it would help, got out, and my wife Judy had to hurry through hers because I told her we needed to get back to the hospital right then. They'd had me on a blood thinner the week before, and by that Monday night I'd crashed with a 104 fever, very badly infected. The surgeon said we've got to operate, and as they wheeled me out that night I told my wife everything she needed to know, because I genuinely thought I wasn't coming back. I remember coming to as they wheeled me into recovery and hearing the nurse say something about this guy being delirious — I have these off-the-wall dreams whenever I'm under anesthesia like that, one time dreaming I was strapped to a gurney in a bright white room with Angus bulls walking overhead while they collected semen from everyone on the gurneys for sale. The second surgery, they had to go back in and clean out scar tissue, took another eighteen inches of colon, and reversed the bag they'd put on me — thank goodness. That time I dreamed I'd crashed in an airplane, and I woke up chewing out my brother, insisting he'd been the pilot, with no idea what I was even saying.

Tom Rowland: That's incredibly realistic, what the mind does under that kind of stress.

Bill Watters: The first surgery was four or nine days in the hospital, and then I ended up back in for a week over Christmas when they reversed the colostomy — it was only supposed to be two days.

Tom Rowland: Did you come away with any kind of perspective change after all that?

Bill Watters: Some, I guess, but mostly I just went right back to doing what I'd always done. It did slow me down some — you get cut open like that and it changes your world a bit — but something tells me it's not going to hold you down for long.

Tom Rowland: No, it doesn't. I still hunt and fish, just haven't climbed a tree stand in two or three years — wasn't about to try that with a scar running from up here all the way down. This last season I'd just pull the mule or the gator up to a spot, raise the front windshield, sit in the seat, and let it camo me off from the limbs, rather than climb. Everybody told me I needed to order some ladder stands, so I finally did — I always loved a climbing stand because you can move around, but I guess that day is behind me. Maybe not — you're making a pretty good comeback, you could probably do it again if you got mad enough at the right deer.

Bill Watters: That's true. It's amazing what we see out there, and the fishing too.

Closing Thoughts

Tom Rowland: Well, listen — I've really enjoyed getting to know you. You've got a beautiful place here.

Bill Watters: Hold on, one more thing — you see that whole display over there? That entire thing is made out of our material, and it's magnetic, so you can pull the whole panel off and it shows you how it goes onto a boat.

Tom Rowland: That's pretty cool — we were actually thinking about doing something like that behind where we shoot the podcast, maybe with a logo, since the light on a regular banner or frame reflects and we have to be really careful setting up our lights. But you could put a light right on this and you'd barely see it, because it's matte.

Bill Watters: And you could still pull one panel down and put up another on a different wall if you wanted logos on it.

Tom Rowland: We'll make one up with some logos on it. You run a great business, and we're real happy to have your product on the boat — it's cool, man. Looking forward to it.

Bill Watters: Excited too — can't wait to see how we do with it.

Tom Rowland: We're going to do great. Alright, thanks, Bill. Thank you. See you.

Bill Watters: Come see us again.

Tom Rowland: Will do.