John Rybovich taught himself to catch fish with a castnet and it wasn't until 1931 that he realized that fishing was more than just catching food. That year John Rybovich Jr. caught his first sailfish and became, as he said, a sportsman. That same year, he acquired his first boat, a carvel-planked 26-foot half-cabin boat that had been used by the Phipps family as a yacht tender and needed work.
Pop Rybovich took it in trade for a yard bill and turned it over to Johnny.
"In that boat, I became a sportsfisherman," John Rybovich Jr. recalled. "I fished a lot, but that time was never wasted. My imagination would mn wild. I'd spend hours dreaming about how I would and wouldn't do things."
During the 193Os, Pop and Johnny Rybovich began teaming up as charter boat skippers. There was no such thing as a sportfishing boat at the time. Open skiffs were impractical but almost anything else that could float was called upon to service a burgeoning industry.
AFTER WORLD WAR II, the Rybovich boys
returned to the boat yard with new ideas that would revolutionize sportfishing
boats.
In those
days,
"With a good idea and a couple of tools, you could make something," recalled
John Jr. in 1989.
As commercial fishermen took to converting cabin cruisers into fishing boats, and money became more plentiful in the late 193Os, the Ryboviches found themselves center stage - ripping out housings, moving bulkheads and windows, and widening railings "so that fishermen wouldn't be cut in half trying to drag a fish over the side."
They replaced the standard single engine with twin engines and installed fish boxes, then ripped the boxes out several years later when anglers found they got in the way as they fought big fish.
A cabin cruiser's controls were down in the cockpit -— a poor place for a captain who had to watch the sea, the fish and the angler. Skippers took to cutting holes in the cabin roof, then sticking their heads up, while steering with their bare toes.
So the next innovation was the flying bridge, with its auxiliary control on the cabin top. Then came the tuna mast, an uncomfortable perch, but one that provided a higher vantage point than the flying bridge.
Pop Rybovich and his three sons learned a great deal by converting cabin cruisers during the busy 1930s.
Then, during the Cat Cay Tuna Toumament in 1939, John Rybovich Jr. came up with an idea that would change the face of sportfishing. But World War II interrupted.
Tommy Rybovich was the first to be drafted. He left home not knowing how to drive a car and returned as a much-decorated pilot with a Distinguished Flying Cross, having flown a battered B-17 to safety.
Just out of high school, Emil joined the Army Air Corps and spent the remainder of the war as a machinist aboard an air-sea rescue boat.
In 1943, Johnny was called up. "The Army tlgured I knew too much about running a boat- building operation to send me overseas," he recalled, "so I spent my Army career in Cincinnati where I was a procurement officer in the design and engineering division for the Army's chief of transportation."