Watch This Kid
In September 1997, Powerboat magazine held the East Coast leg of its annual Performance Trials in Panama City Beach, Fla. I’d been with the magazine a little more than two years as its managing editor, which made me—by far—the most “junior” person on a test team that included Eric Colby, Powerboat’s editor in chief, Bob Teague, its lead test driver and technical editor, and head photographer Tom Newby.
Fiore (second from left) packed a number of accomplishments—including a V-bottom kilo record in April—into his relatively short life. Photo by Matt Trulio
When we arrived at the launch ramp, a young man slaving to wipe off the morning dew from the deck of the most beautiful V-bottom I’d ever seen caught my eye. The guy working hard on the boat’s deck looked so young that I figured he was an employee of the company that built it.
“Watch this kid,” Teague said to me, nodding toward the man on the boat, as we walked toward it. “He has his act together. He’s going to do things.”
That kid was then 27-year-old Mike Fiore, who had founded Outerlimits Offshore Powerboats four years earlier in Holbrook, Long Island, N.Y., and I watched him, so to speak, as a journalist for the next 17 years.
and then