GOING STRONG

Life Proof Boats CEO Micah Bowers likes to make videos. Around the time the company was founded in 2016, he jammed a pocket-knife, a speargun, a machete and an arrow into the foam buoyancy collar on one of its boats. He also clobbered the collar with both ends of an axe and then grabbed a Stihl chainsaw. All of this was captured on a YouTube video, except for the part with the chainsaw. Asked why that part was blacked out, Bowers laughs and admits that the chainsaw wouldn’t start.

Bowers grew up on Puget Sound’s Bainbridge Island where he says boating was part of the lifestyle. During college summers he worked in the Alaskan fisheries and after getting his mechanical engineering degree at Gonzaga University he worked in Hawaii. When he learned SAFE Boats in Bremerton, Washington, was looking for an engineer, he jumped at the opportunity to get into boat manufacturing. In 2014, he went to Inventech Marine Solutions (IMS), which launched the Life Proof brand in 2016.

Bowers says the foam collars on Life Proof Boats act like life jackets that stabilize the aluminum