About a year ago, Sean Marrero was on a camping trip with a group of families from the Orlando area. Some of the other campers knew that Marrero, chief strategy officer for Correct Craft, worked for a boating company. “One of the dads asked if we made a boat that would work well for fishing inland coastal waters,” he says. “We owned BassCat, but that boat was designed for going fast and fishing in fresh water. So I mentioned SeaArk as a possibility. His immediate response was that aluminum boats were not a good choice because they are too noisy.”
Marrero says he didn’t think too much about the conversation and just “filed it away.” But nine months later, shortly after being named president of Correct Craft’s new Watershed Innovation division, a proverbial lightbulb went off in Marrero’s brain.
Correct Craft
Watershed had been formed by Correct Craft CEO Bill Yeargin to develop “disruptive innovations,” for the marine industry—in other words, fresh ways of design and manufacturing that had the potential to propel the industry in a radical new direction.
Senior Design Team
Watershed put together a team of a dozen senior students from the electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science departments at UCF. “The students really took the lead from there,” says Marrero. “They designed the boat we built, including all of the computational fluid dynamics, 3D-printed models to simulate the amount of noise on different shaped designs, and all of the CAD. They also built in their own sensors and PCB board to support a cloud database and mobile app.”