History

Who is Faction Marine?

Back in 2003 when I opened Faction Marine, we discovered that the market in Alexandria had a need for wakeboard specific coaching. We were selling a good number of wakeboards in our store and people had tons of questions about how to use our equipment and how to perform various tricks. They had even more questions about how to pull the kids around, how fast they should drive, or how long the rope should be. We decided to add a little coaching to our list of things that we offer our customers. We would offer to come out and coach the customers and help them get things figured out on the water so they could enjoy the boards they were buying from us. I didn't realize it at that moment, but we had started what would become SurfMN.

At first, people on the local lakes weren't really equipped to do wake surfing on their own, as their I/O boats weren't safe for surfing behind. We offered hourly and daily lessons behind our boat and more and more people fell in love with it and realized that they had to experience the thrills for themselves. In order to surf though, they needed a proper inboard boat to do it behind. As the popularity grew locally, SurfMN was taking off. As more and more people got into surfing, the market demanded inboard boats set up for surfing. That's where Faction Marine was born.

In the early days of Faction Marine, it was mostly just me getting a nice used boat in and then setting it up as a premiere turnkey wake surfing boat. I was putting in huge stereo systems, drilling holes in boats and adding as much ballast as that boat could hold. We were customizing the boats with fresh air exhaust, making them even better boats for wake surfing while reducing noise and carbon monoxide that riders were being exposed to. It was a lot of fun, and to tell you the truth we were getting really good at it! On top of that I started to compete on the World Series of Wakesurfing and promoting our surf school SurfMN.

In 2012 I purchased a really nice Centurion Enzo SV230. It had all the bells and whistles and was set up for Wake surfing. My entire crew loved that boat and I figured I'd have that thing for the foreseeable future. One day in June of that year I received a call from Todd Gaughan of Fineline industries. He asked me to become the Minnesota promo driver for Centurion Boats. I tossed the idea around for a couple days and decided to move forward with that and had my brand new 2012 SV233! That was a day that changed my life forever. Up to that point I had just been buying and selling used boats and setting up boats for customers. Now, I was moving into the new boat segment!