Episode 996 of the Tom Rowland Podcast is my conversation with Dan Dillon, founder of Aquaphobix — the heat-applied thermal plastic hull coating behind the viral Qualified Captain video of a man blowtorching a Yellowfin. Dan explains how a swimming pool product with a 30-year industrial track record became a non-toxic alternative to copper bottom paint, why the coating bonds at over 800 psi, and what the bottom paint industry does not want boat owners to know.
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Aquaphobix is a pneumatic thermal plastic that is melted onto fiberglass, metal, or concrete with a heat-application process. On a boat, the coating bonds to the hull at over 800 psi and creates a hard, non-ablative surface that resists marine growth without leaching copper or other toxins into the water. Boats coated with it have been tested at speeds up to 60 miles per hour with no delamination.
Traditional antifouling bottom paint is ablative — it works by slowly leaching copper and other biocides into the water, and pieces peel off as growth detaches. Aquaphobix does not leach at all. Dan Dillon says it is the only hull coating that is both marine life certified and marine water certified, and it also carries a drinking-water-safe certification. Instead of annual repainting, a coated boat only needs to be hauled out about once every five years.
Copper antifouling paint works by poisoning organisms that try to attach to the hull, and that copper concentrates in marinas and harbors where boats sit. The paint peels off in pieces that settle on the bottom, and the copper and microplastics end up in the fish people eat. Dan visited Baltimore's harbor and heard locals say almost nothing lives in the water there anymore. Some countries have restricted or banned the older high-copper formulas.
Dan has seen bottom paint pricing run up to $300 per foot, with the paint itself costing anywhere from $500 to $2,500 per gallon. The surprising part is the breakdown: roughly 70 percent of the annual cost is sanding, stripping, and prep labor — not the paint. Add rack fees of around $350 per day while the boat waits at the yard, and the recurring expense becomes one of the biggest line items in boat ownership.
The hull is prepped, then a dry powder — it looks like talcum powder, loaded 40 pounds at a time into a hopper — is pneumatically shot through a flame so it melts onto the surface on contact. That heat application is why the viral Qualified Captain video looked like a guy taking a blowtorch to a Yellowfin. The result is a 100 percent melted plastic layer fused to the hull.
Dan Dillon is the founder of Aquaphobix. He started JSec, an electronic prescriptions company, in 1999, grew it to 26,000 doctors and several million patients, and sold it in 2012 at age 44. After a stint as a caddy at Kiawah Island and a move to South Florida, he became a pool contractor around Hurricane Irma, discovered Ecofinish thermal plastic coatings at a pool trade show, and became the brand's biggest swimming pool installer before adapting the technology to boat hulls.
Almost a million people saw the Qualified Captain clip of a guy doing something with a blowtorch to the bottom of a Yellowfin, and like everyone else I had questions. I tracked down the man behind it. What I found was not a gimmick — it was a pool contractor from South Florida quietly adapting a decades-old industrial coating to one of the most stubborn problems in boating. I wanted to know exactly what he was melting onto those hulls, why, and whether it actually holds up. Dan answered all of it.
The product starts as a dry powder that looks like talcum powder, sitting in a hopper forty pounds at a time. Dan's crew shoots it pneumatically through a flame so the plastic melts onto the fiberglass on contact, fusing into a bond he measures at over 800 psi. The technology started in South Africa, was developed by a Pennsylvania family for acid-holding tanks, and has coated everything from Disney pools to fiberglass drinking water tanks. How that industrial lineage translates to a boat hull running 60 miles per hour is the first thing we unpack in the episode.
Copper has been king of antifouling for decades, and it works the same way it always has: by leaching poison into the water. Dan describes visiting Baltimore's harbor and hearing locals say nothing lives in the water anymore, and he draws the line from peeling paint chips to the copper and microplastics that end up in the fish we eat. He also explains why the older, harsher formulas are banned in some places. His case against the status quo is hard to unhear once you have heard it.
The story that stuck with me involves the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, a 102-year-old former rock quarry that is filled by the city aquifer and drains 960,000 gallons a day back into the drinking water system. Chlorine cannot be kept above one part per million there, so growth is constant, and coatings that shed are unacceptable in a pool connected to the water people drink. Dan's team was called in specifically because of their drinking-water-safe certification. What that job proved about the coating tells you everything about why it belongs on boat hulls. He tells the full story in the episode.
Here is the breakdown Dan walked me through: bottom paint can run up to $300 per foot, the paint itself costs $500 to $2,500 per gallon, and rack fees stack up at roughly $350 per day while your boat waits. About 70 percent of the annual cost is not paint at all — it is the labor of stripping, sanding, and prepping the old coat. Dan's pitch to boat owners is simple: pull the boat once every five years instead. His account of how yards and dealers respond when their recurring revenue is threatened is one of the most candid parts of the conversation.
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Dan's path here is its own story. He started JSec, an electronic prescriptions company, in 1999, grew it to 26,000 doctors and several million patients, and sold it in 2012 at age 44. Retirement lasted about as long as you would expect — he went to caddy school at Kiawah Island alongside teenagers, carrying bags for twenty dollars a loop, before moving to South Florida and becoming a pool contractor just as Hurricane Irma hit. A chance encounter at a pool trade show introduced him to the thermal plastic that became Aquaphobix. The whole arc is in the episode.
The day after this conversation, I kept thinking about Dan's first boat — a 290 Sea Ray he bought in Charleston. The dealer told him it needed bottom paint, and he said the result looked like someone put an ugly wig on his $180,000 boat. Every boat owner knows that feeling, and most of us accepted it as the cost of doing business.
What Dan is really challenging is the assumption underneath: that the only way to keep growth off a hull is to slowly poison the water around it. Whether Aquaphobix becomes the standard or simply forces the industry to innovate, the questions he raises about copper, cost, and who profits from the annual haul-out cycle deserve answers.
Listen to the full conversation before your next bottom job. It may change the math for you.
Dan Dillon is the founder of Aquaphobix, a South Florida company applying pneumatic thermal plastic coatings to boat hulls as a non-toxic alternative to copper antifouling paint. A serial entrepreneur, he founded the electronic prescriptions company JSec in 1999, scaled it to 26,000 physicians, and sold it in 2012 before becoming a pool contractor in the wake of Hurricane Irma. He became the largest Ecofinish pool coating installer in South Florida, then spent years adapting the 30-year-old industrial technology — marine life certified, marine water certified, and drinking-water safe — for the recreational boating market, where coated hulls have been tested at 60 miles per hour with no delamination.
Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 998 with Dan Dillon.
Dan: My name is Dan Dillon from Aquaphobix, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.
Tom: Dan, what's going on today?
Dan: Well, I've been out shuffling some boats around and trying to make people happy.
Tom: How are you making people happy with boats these days? You've got an interesting business, man. I was checking out what you do from a video on Instagram, and it's very intriguing. I don't know exactly what you're doing with the blowtorch and what you're spraying on the bottom of the boats. Tell me what Aquaphobix is.
Dan: It's a thermoplastic that we melt onto fiberglass, onto metal, onto concrete. About seven or eight years ago, not long before Hurricane Irma, we started with this product. It was a European company that introduced it and brought it to the States. We started using it on swimming pools with tremendous success, and then, like everybody who sees it, we started wondering what other applications it could have. We spent at least six years developing it further to work perfectly on swimming pools, and in the last year or two we've been messing around trying it on fiberglass boats to see where that leads.
Tom: What kind of trade show were you at when you first saw it?
Dan: I was at a pool show — I'm a pool contractor. The original product was designed for acid-holding tanks, an industrial product where people coated the insides of concrete vessels and dipped their metal parts in and out to strip grease before powder coating. They were struggling because the acid was eating the concrete, so they developed this coating. It's almost thirty years old now — it started in South Africa, brought over by a family out of Pennsylvania. So when we talk about it, the backstory is a lot deeper than people think; it's not some brand-new product, it's tried and true with all kinds of certifications. It became extremely popular and successful on the pool side. In typical fashion, I get a little bored, so I started trying other things with it.
Dan: I like solving problems, and bottom paint has bugged me since I bought my first boat with real money — a 290 Sea Ray in Charleston, South Carolina. They told me I had to keep it in the water at the dock, and that meant bottom paint. I didn't know what they were talking about. They painted the boat, and I spent about three weeks moping over what it looked like. That's my personal attachment to it — I remember thinking, I'm never buying a boat again that I have to leave in the water. I'd just spent a lot of money and someone put an ugly coating on it. Then I was paying divers all the time to scrape it. I left that behind when I moved down here, retired from healthcare in 2012, realized I was too young to retire, became a pool contractor, and ran into Aquaphobix. So far, so good — we're testing really well with it.
Tom: The most intriguing part — the thing that grabs people who've never seen it — is the application. It's put on with a blowtorch, and from what I could see it starts as some sort of powder. Explain the whole process.
Dan: It's a dry powder, and the process is very similar whether it's a fiberglass pool or a fiberglass boat. You sand the gel coat down with about 60-grit sandpaper, tape off the area with fireproof tape, and apply a heat-activated epoxy, rolled on just like you'd roll on bottom paint. Then we use a compressor, propane, and a hopper holding about 40 pounds of powder — it looks just like baby powder or talcum powder — and we pneumatically shove it through the flame. The product comes out of the flame and flocks onto the surface, almost like spray painting, except you have a torch on the end. It typically takes three coats. One of the things that attracted me to it initially was that it isn't restricted by humidity the way gel coat or paint application usually is, and in South Florida we don't have many days that aren't humid. It has an incredible bond strength — it doesn't come off. We've tested boats up to 60 miles an hour with no delamination and none of those problems. Anybody who's ever had to sand a boat every year knows we're solving a real problem. Beyond the look of it, the thing that excites me most is the environmental side.
Dan: Every time I visit somewhere — I was in Baltimore Harbor last year — the locals complain that all the boats sitting there have killed off the fish and the grass; it's a desert now.
Tom: And they think that's from the bottom paint?
Dan: One hundred percent. Copper used to be king for inhibiting growth, and that product is designed to leach into the water — it's going somewhere. There's study after study on the problems that concentration of boats and copper have caused in our marinas and bays. That copper and those microplastics end up in the fish, and then in us when we eat the fish. We're now testing blood levels for it. This product in particular made me stop drinking out of plastic water bottles — doctors can now tell whether you drink out of plastic, and it's causing all kinds of problems.
Tom: So what I'd think looking at your product is that it's some sort of melted plastic.
Dan: It is 100% melted plastic. The difference is it never leaves the boat — it's not ablative. Diving deep into the difference between hard paints and ablative paints shocked me: they're designed to pollute our water. When something organic attaches to ablative paint, the only way it comes off the boat is by peeling a piece of paint off with it as it falls. So a diver scraping your boat is literally scraping paint into the water.
Tom: I made this mistake once — we ran triple trips a day, every day, and the boat stayed in the water for three months during the hottest part of the year. We literally grew a reef on the bottom. When I finally pulled it out, I was shocked — you can't get that stuff off. Chipping it away took pieces of the boat with it. I was unaware of how serious the environmental consequences of bottom paint were. What was the first bottom paint — do we have any idea?
Dan: I've gone down that rabbit hole. It used to be pine tar — they'd heat and melt pine tar into the bottom of wooden hulls. That wasn't meant to stop growth, it's just what they had. Copper eventually became the dominant antifouling metal and has for years. There are still some less-regulated countries where you can get real copper paint put on a boat, but those days are numbered as environmental regulators zero in on it.
Dan: It's interesting you mentioned the beard that grows on a boat that runs twenty-four seven — every day it grows thicker and performance drops. I don't want to sound like a tree-hugger, but I do care about our water, and there's a sliding scale of whether the benefit is worth it. If your performance is dropping and you're burning more fuel, that's another cost besides what's going into the water. What's currently available is not great for the environment — we know that. We believe our solution solves that problem and helps tremendously with efficiency. Even against today's best bottom paint, they're not winning the efficiency battle either.
Tom: You're confident your product is better for the environment than traditional bottom paint. Why?
Dan: We're the only coating out there that's marine-life certified and marine-water certified. When we worked at SeaWorld, our biggest concern was airborne dust from the spray process — we're getting about 97% of what we shoot onto the boat, but we still had to monitor air quality so nothing drifted toward the dolphin exhibit. We're also drinking-water-safe certified, which you can verify on our website.
Tom: Why would you need a certification like that?
Dan: You need it to do work at places like Disney or SeaWorld, where they require certification just to bid on the job. It says the product does not contaminate the water — with anything. This is a ten-year certification: over those years we won't contribute to pollution that could harm marine animals. Studies already show plastics in fish that we catch and eat. Our bond to the boat itself measures around 800 psi. I don't want to put anything in the water that hurts it.
Tom: And the drinking-water certification?
Dan: The product is antimicrobial and antibacterial and is food-safe — we spray floors at places like Mars, where they make candy, to keep bacteria from growing. In places like Hope Town, where homes rely on cisterns and holding tanks for fresh water because there's no municipal supply, we spray the inside of those fiberglass tanks so people aren't drinking leached contaminants.
Dan: We just finished a hundred-and-two-year-old pool in Coral Gables called the Venetian Pool — a national landmark built in an old rock quarry. It's filled daily from the city aquifer, the same drinking water Coral Gables residents use, and drained back into that aquifer every day. Because they can only keep chlorine below one part per million there, they get algae growth. So the city tried bottom-painting the pool with a boat bottom paint to fight the algae, but every time they drained it, paint chips went straight into the city's drinking water system. That's why they called us in — we were the only company in the country able to cover 26,000 square feet with a drinking-water-safe coating, so residents aren't drinking water full of paint chips anymore.
Tom: So traditional bottom paint has no such certifications and is toxic by nature — that's literally how it keeps growth off, by leaching copper or something else we don't want in the water.
Dan: That's correct — it's microplastics and silicone. The deeper I get into this, the more I feel like an investigative reporter uncovering that products used here aren't allowed elsewhere in the world because of what they do to the environment. I have no issue cutting down a tree if I need it, but I do have an issue with deliberately poisoning ourselves.
Tom: You mentioned greenwashing — what does that mean?
Dan: I was interviewing an engineer from a major paint manufacturer and noticed their packaging had a big green no-biocides callout. It makes people drop their guard and assume it must be good for the environment, when it's absolutely not — it's horrible with microplastics and has to be reapplied constantly. Greenwashing is claiming to be environmentally friendly while the details tell a different story. It reminds me of the joke about the preacher paid to say something nice about a man's jerk brother: compared to his brother, he was a saint. Some of these products are really just being compared to something worse, not held to an actual standard.
Tom: If your product truly lasts longer and is better for the environment, that would make some people very unhappy. Have you run into that?
Dan: Some marina owners love the process and are moving forward with us. The hardest pushback is over revenue — marinas make money on haul-out fees, dock fees, sanding fees, and then the paint itself, which can run $500 to $2,500 a gallon. When I tell them a boat only needs to come out once every five years instead of every year, they see it as a threat to that revenue stream. I tell them the oar guys probably weren't happy when Yamaha engines came out either. It's not going to be for everyone — not everyone prioritizes the environment, the look, or even performance — but people are going to demand it, and there's no hiding from a better product once it exists. One large marina I spoke with this morning wants in and is training to become a dealer, and their only question was whether we'd refer customers their way for the marinas that don't adopt it. I said absolutely.
Dan: On average, 70% of the cost of a bottom paint job is the sanding and prep, not the paint or labor to reapply it, which is the other 30%. So marinas aren't really making their money on the paint — they're making it on hauling the boat out every year, sanding it, and dealing with the waste. All of that sanding dust ends up on the ground, often close to the water, and it just repeats year after year. Marinas are increasingly under pressure to reclaim that waste. Prices for bottom paint run anywhere from $150 to $300 a foot, plus rack fees of $250 to $350 a day while a boat sits waiting to be sanded and painted. If you eliminate the need to redo that every year, you eliminate roughly 70% of that recurring cost.
Dan: Some of my early customers up north have had our coating on channel buoys for ten to twelve years. They just pull the buoy up, hose it off, and put it back — versus the old process of hauling it out, repainting, and redeploying it.
Tom: If traditional bottom paint is as bad as you say, it seems like only a matter of time before it's restricted further. Is that already happening?
Dan: Yes, in California and Washington, and a couple of other states — it always starts on the coasts. I actually met with our local representative, and he said it's coming to Florida too, though it'll take a while. Every time regulators strip a harmful ingredient out of traditional bottom paint to protect the environment, the paint becomes less effective. What excites me about our approach is that it's a rare situation where the boat owner wins, the environment wins, and the applicators win all at the same time.
Tom: Is this a big company, or who's behind it with you?
Dan: We're a small, family-owned company — my wife and sister-in-law are both deeply involved. The original coating company, Ecofinish, is a larger family-owned business doing maybe $60 to $80 million in revenue, focused on swimming pools and industrial use. I approached them and got the exclusive rights to apply the product specifically to boat bottoms. I'm now in the patent-pending stage for the boat application process, and the sprayer itself is made in Italy — I'm actually heading over there later this year to secure rights to some equipment adjustments, including a new backpack sprayer we've been testing.
Dan: Before this, in 1999 I started a company called JSec, an early electronic prescription service — by the time a patient left the doctor's office, their prescription was already at the pharmacy. We were the first to interface directly with Medicare's database, and by the time I sold the company we had about 26,000 doctors and several million patients on the platform. I sold it in 2012 at 44, thought I'd play golf and fish, but I got restless and started in the pool business just as Hurricane Irma hit — I learned the pool trade through a fire hose. Two weeks after selling the company, I was even working as a certified caddy in South Carolina just to have something to do.
Tom: That's everybody, man — you see it with older folks too. My dad is 87 and still goes to work every day. It keeps him sharp. I've seen friends' fathers retire with nothing to do, and within a couple of months their health starts to decline.
Tom: That's exactly how I found you — a video that took off. What has that done for the company?
Dan: Things have changed fast. I was an IT guy who had trouble figuring out how to log into a podcast, and a month ago I downloaded Instagram for the first time — I'd never had a social media account. I understood the power of it in theory, but I didn't really grasp it until that video went out and I started seeing well over 100,000 views. There's a downside to the internet, obviously, but if you go down the bottom-paint rabbit hole and watch that video, within ten minutes you'll know who I am, where I live, and whether my certifications are real. There's no hiding — and that goes for the paint companies too. It creates so much opportunity for people to educate themselves before they buy a boat or a fishing rod.
Tom: Where do you see this heading — smaller boats, bigger vessels, cruise ships?
Dan: The bigger the boat, the more problems, the more chemicals in the water, and the more expensive it is to haul in and out — so the return on investment changes drastically depending on how a boat is used. It brings to mind meeting the chief maritime inspector for Royal Caribbean on a delayed flight. He explained that every port they pull into outside the United States tests the water and fines them based on chemicals coming off the hull paint. We're actually planning to meet up in Italy to talk further about a potential application for the bottom of a Royal Caribbean ship. Whether or not someone cares about the environment, if they care about money, we can save them a lot of it — though it varies with use and boat size. It's a rare win-win-win.
Tom: It's cool that you're a family-owned, locally operated company here in the Keys. I'm really glad we connected — I honestly wasn't sure what to expect, but it's clearly legit, and I think people are going to be interested in the durability and environmental benefits, plus a lot less maintenance. Good for you, man.
Dan: We'd rather be fishing than sanding. I really appreciate you taking the time, and I look forward to more conversations.
Tom: Maybe we'll put this on the bottom of one of our boats that stays in the water. Where can people find you?
Dan: Find us on Instagram at Aquaphobix Official, and at aquaphobix.com — spelled with an x. We're on Facebook under Aquaphobix as well. We look forward to hearing from everybody and answering any questions.
Tom: Great, thanks, man. We'll talk to you soon.
Dan: Alright, thanks, bud. Bye bye.
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