Our lives have always been surrounded by water. Magda grew up swimming 4-6 hours a day training to become a 3-time collegiate National Champion at Auburn University while I, with much less acclaim, grew up fishing, swimming, skiing, hunting and doing everything I could to be on the water. We love the water so much, that less than a year after college we both decided to move to Destin, FL together. As life goes, we made the move, got married and found great careers.

We first tried stand up paddling in late 2008 and loved the "idea"…but hated the product; both form and function. All of the boards we tried were the same thing but with a different name. They were all basically giant, unstable, surfboards. It was around that time that I looked at Magda and said, "We can make this better; we can make a board that stands apart."

So…we left our successful careers (Magda was a financial advisor and I was a Mechanical Engineer) and started making our boats, or what we decided to call "BOTE". All we had for funding was a cashed in 401K worth about 7 Grand, a pocket full of credit cards and a shit-ton of hard work ahead of us.