EP 139: 46 Sparks, Dream Center Console Build

Mike Grandonico didn't just buy a bigger boat—he engineered a fishing fortress. After 15 years of building boats with Bob Sparks, he commissioned a 46-foot center console that’s essentially a beefed-up Bahama, but with three-inch-thick tower legs, a refrigerated mezzanine seat, and zero sonar. The boat was designed for sailfishing and dead-bait dredging in the Bahamas, where visibility and simplicity trump tech. Mike’s radical choices—no buggy top, no dive door, no generator, no frills—were all deliberate. He prioritized durability, ease of maintenance, and comfort over luxury, even turning the mezzanine into a freezer box and the cabin into a climate-controlled rod storage vault. Despite having no sonar, he catches billfish consistently, relying on radar and bird sightings. His biggest regret? Not installing a Seakeeper. But for a man who once said, 'If God wanted us to have fiberglass boats, he would have given us fiberglass trees,' this is the perfect tool for the job: a no-nonsense, overbuilt, deeply personal machine built for the fish, not the show.