My dad got his first boat in high school. Not long after, he shipped out with the Navy. When he came home, he married his high school sweetheart — my mom — and the two of them spent the rest of their lives on the water together.

They had four kids. By the time I came along, we had a 33-foot Chris Craft, and before long they'd graduated to a 45' Bayliner that basically became our summer home. We boated Lake Michigan every year of my childhood — I'm the youngest of four kids, and we all learned to swim, fish, and steer before we could really reach the wheel.

In between the big boats, there were the small ones — a rotating fleet of 16 to 19-foot Bayliners, we used as dingies. The last of them was a little boat we all just called the "Always II Toy". My parents spent decades teaching safe boating education with the United States Power Squadron, and I grew up right alongside that — I had my boat driver's license at 14, and I haven't stopped driving since.

When my wife (who also grew up on boats) and I bought our first boat together, it was fitting that it was that same boat — The Always II Toy, passed down from my parents. We ran it for four or five years before we moved up to the boat we have now: a 2018 Monterey M4, appropriately named "The Toy". It's the boat our own two kids are growing up on, out on the Illinois River and the Kankakee River. It's also, if you've seen our sample artwork, the actual boat in the photo — the one this whole company started with.

Ripple & Fin exists because I know what it feels like to look at a boat and see forty years of summers, not just fiberglass and horsepower. That Chris Craft, those Bayliners, The Always II Toy, our Monterey — each one held a different chapter of my family, and only one of them is still tied up at a dock today. But they didn't have to disappear. That's the whole idea behind what we do: your boat, the one that's carried your people through your own chapters, deserves a wall, not just a slip.

— Scott