Disabled Angler Builds a Custom 72 Viking

Perry Nichols grew up bass fishing across central North Carolina, excelling at football and fishing alike, until his teenage muscles began failing him. Doctors diagnosed muscular dystrophy. He kept building a life anyway — ran several businesses, owned a car dealership, married his wife Lisa — but when his hands got too weak to cast or reel, he sold his bass boats and gave up fishing entirely.

Years later, a chance meeting in Palm Beach with Darrell Gwynn — a world champion drag racer paralyzed in a 1990 crash — brought him back. Gwynn had customized his own pontoon boat for wheelchair use and invited Nichols out; using specialized reels, Nichols found he could still fish even with mobility now limited mostly to one arm. That was enough to reignite the passion, and Nichols decided to build a boat of his own.

Through a mutual friend he connected with Earle Hall of Bluewater Yacht Sales, who’d already converted a 52-foot Viking for fellow muscular-dystrophy angler Steve Jones — complete with a davit system, lifts, elevators, a rising-and-lowering toilet, and a Stidd electric chair on the bridge that let Jones run the boat and bait a marlin himself. Working to the same standard, and racing a deadline to fish North Carolina’s Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament that June, Hall found a 2008 64-foot Viking at a boat show and the team rebuilt it in months: a cockpit davit to lift Nichols and his 500-pound wheelchair aboard, a widened salon door with a removable ramp, a scissor lift to the master stateroom, a raised head, and cockpit wiring for Nichols’ custom electric reels. They named her Knot Done Yet, made the Big Rock deadline, then spent two more months installing a Seakeeper gyro stabilizer.

Viking Yachts CEO Pat Healey heard about the build, came to see it, and told Nichols he wanted in on the next one. That next boat came a few years later, when the 64 started feeling cramped for Nichols, his captain, a mate, and the two lifelong friends who travel with him — the new 72-footer went from three beds to seven, added twin MTU engines good for 46 knots, and was built start-to-finish at Viking’s own facility in about eight months, again finished just in time for the Big Rock, where Nichols released a white marlin and a 300-pound blue on his new boat. The biggest single improvement over the old boat was replacing the old ramp with an in-cockpit scissor lift — guests, his crew says, barely notice it’s there.

Based on reporting by Charlie Levine for Power & Motoryacht, with photos by Tom Spencer. Read the original story at powerandmotoryacht.com.