Fish Tales and Boat Sales: Meet Brian Komer of HMY Yacht Sales

Hi, I'm Katie Flanagan, and we're back with Fishtails and Boat Sales. Today, we're welcoming HMY Viking specialist Brian Comer. Welcome, Brian. Thanks for having me, Katie. Let's jump in. What's your story? Where are you from, and how did you get into fishing? I was born in South Florida, North Miami to be exact. I started fishing about the age of three with my dad, primarily inshore fishing from the Keys to Palm Beach County. I started tournament fishing when I was eight years old, and from there, that started leading to more and more interest and a love for it, graduating to fishing offshore. Fast forward ultimately to moving to the Keys out of high school and going to college and working on charter boats and starting a career that I never looked back. You grew up in South Florida. You fished all over. How did you end up at HMY? I started working for the Viking yacht company. I was close friends with the demo manager at the time and captain Ryan Higgins. And I had just gotten off an operation that I was working with. Switched over with Ryan to help him out for a couple of tournaments. One thing led to another and ultimately went up north to fish the Mid-Atlantic region, New Jersey, Maryland, Carolinas. And then coming back after that, we went to the Fort Lauderdale boat show. As a licensed captain, they needed help running boats for sea trials. So they gave me a little crash course in how to walk and talk through a Viking and help people. And I had a really good friend at the time go up to Pat Healy and tell him he needs to hire me. And if I'm not working for his company, he was going to take me. And it was months and months of little work here and there trying to help him out to where they finally said yes. Why don't you come work for us full time? And I did that for almost eight years, going down the production line and learning about the boats from start to finish to fishing them in a tournament. It was that that kind of molded me into a sales position that I'm in now without knowing it was happening. I kind of wanted to see what the next step would be. And right about that same moment, Steve Moynihan called me. He called me in his office and he said, I want you to, I want to be clear, this is not an interview. You're coming to work for me and you're going to be on the Viking team. It's really nice to be able to work for a company building one of the finest sport fishing boats in the world and then transitioning into one of the top companies that sell them. So for me, there wasn't a lot of a learning curve other than maybe trying to figure out a contract or two. It was a natural progression. And I found out going forward that I'd already been doing the job. I was just doing it on the other end. Now I kind of had it all to myself to where I could sit down with an owner, a potential buyer, a client and inform them of the boat and know that what I was saying was pretty close to accurate because the boat we're looking at, I happened to be part of a build in 10 different of those models. So it just, it just all kind of made sense. Can you tell us more about the demo program? So the demonstrator program that Viking has, when I started with him, was one boat and then it slowly transitioned into two boats. The demo program, what's unique about that is the Viking product going around fishing, running sea trials, entertaining clients. Majority of the time in those tournaments, the team is made up of mostly the top engineers, vice presidents, a lot of the heads of the company. So in a sense, you know, there's a lot of research and development going on, you know, while we're out fishing, not realizing it. It's not that they're just coming up with a design, sitting in a boardroom and putting it together, making it make sense on paper and putting the boat out. They'll put the boat in the water, take it offshore, go fish it, come back and try and figure out what to do better. And the demo program itself, doing all that is beneficial in the fact that the demo program doesn't just fish one area or another or just go trolling versus live baiting. They'll do a little bit of everything. They'll try and figure out, you know, what is the best way to troll a boat? What are the creature comforts you're going to want if you're sitting on a rod for eight hours a day in a tournament or fun fishing, pulling heavy tackle in Bermuda or, you know, going to Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic or Mexico or sitting off Palm Beach and putting kites up. They kind of run the boat through all of its motions. And down to, I remember a lot of times come Christmas, just simply taking the boat for a cruise on the intercoastal and there'd be 10 people sitting on the bridge and another 10 in the cockpit and utilizing the interior space for entertainment and, you know, turning a fighting chair into a cocktail table. It's, they kind of, they kind of do it all. Being part of the demo program was probably the best education I could have gotten in my career. So the, you know, seven and a half to eight years of Viking, what I learned from them in general about boats, not just a Viking. I use that today when I'm sea trialing and surveying and talking about other boats, the comparisons and just the knowledge that I've seen it done so many times, you know, in a build process to a finished product that it helps me talk to the clients because I know what's behind that wall or what's under that couch or what's behind that panel. For anyone that doesn't know, when you walk into Brian's office at HMI, the shelves are covered with tournament trophies. Brian, can you tell us more about some of your most memorable fishing tournaments? I've been very fortunate in my career. I fished with a lot of very, very good captains that taught me a lot about the sport, the industry, and put myself in some pretty good positions. Back in 2006, 2007, I was fortunate enough to be part of the ESPN circuit. We won a few tournaments overall points over the course of, I think it was six months. We ended up winning the grand championship and that was very early in my career. I feel like that really jumped me out there because a lot of people didn't know who I was. Years after that, I was on another operation that traveled the world pretty extensively. We started in the Keys. We did some sailfish tournaments in Miami, went to the Bahamas, fished the custom boat shootout. We won that tournament. We placed in a lot of sailfish tournaments. We went to the Pacific with the idea of practicing heavy tackle for an upcoming season in Bermuda. That was in 2008, I believe. That was a special year. We went to Bermuda and we did very well over there. We killed some big fish. We placed very well. We won the Triple Crown series that year, but it was pretty cool because we basically fished as a team all year, all over the world. And everywhere we went, if we didn't win the tournament, somehow in Calcutta wise, on side bets, we won all the money. So that year alone was a pretty memorable year for me. Going forward, I started getting more into the sailfish circuit in South Florida, fishing with some big teams and in live baiting and trolling, just different styles of fishing. The buccaneer tournament, being that it's in my backyard in my home, that tournament's been very close to me. I've had great success in that tournament. Numerous top angler awards and top three finishes multiple times. It's a great tournament for the area and it's usually pretty good fishing too, which breaks it up a lot. And fishing the Northeast, I hadn't really, I hadn't spent a lot of time up there. A lot of my experiences were down in the Caribbean, traveling. Getting to the Northeast when I signed on with Viking, fishing those tournaments, it was just something different for me. You know, the long runs, the long days. But again, putting myself in a position to be with the best in the industry. One of the first years that I was running a boat for Viking, we went to Beach Haven and I'd never been. I didn't really know the area, but I had a good crew of guys from Johnson & Towers, late Bob Schomo, the colonel they called. He was with us. That was a big win for us because we won the release division. Bob killed a few big fish. Basically down the board, we took everything. It was special because I was just starting to come up through the ranks, so to speak, you know, with Viking and running the boats. And a lot of people kind of knew me as the mate. And, you know, I was kind of running the operation myself. And it kind of gave me that much more confidence to push ahead and having the knowledge of the boats and my team in the cockpit of all the heads of the company that were helping me with everything with the boat. It took some of the pressure off and I was fortunate to have that with the company. Seasons later, going up to North Carolina, I was told I was going to fish the Big Rock. I'd never fished the Big Rock tournament. I'd heard about it. I knew a lot about it. But again, you know, the Northeast Mid-Atlantic region just wasn't my home. It wasn't my backyard. So I was nervous. I still am when I go up there years later. It's there's a lot of very, very good fishermen, very knowledgeable crews, good owners that, you know, they they know just as much as any crew out there. They could