Tony served 4 years in the U.S. Army beginning in 1968 before returning from Vietnam in 1972. During his tour in Vietnam, Tony was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Tony remained a helicopter instructor pilot for the Army National Guard for another 6 years following.
The real Seaboard Marine story started in the late 1970’s when Tony first moved to Ventura County and began commercial fishing with his brother Tim Athens on the F/V “Local Banks”. After spending a few years commercial fishing, Tony soon realized that his “mechanical” skills could be best used to provide engineering and mechanical service to the local commercial fishing fleet. In 1985, he became the first official Cummins Marine dealer on the West Coast, and as time went on, Tony began taking on larger and more complicated projects, eventually working his way to performing full-scale complete repower and restoration of both recreational and commercial fishing boats.
Blast forward to today and Tony is known throughout the docks from Hawaii to New York to Key Largo (the Seaboard Triangle), as “The Repower Specialist”.
Tony has worked with hundreds of boats, replacing old inefficient engines with state of the art super efficient and low pollution modern power plants, along with upgrading the entire power train design to the 21st century. Tony was one of the first in California to perform repower projects under the Carl Moyer government grant program, which provides grant funding for cleaner-than-required engines and equipment. The Carl Moyer Program achieves reductions in emissions of key pollutants which are necessary for California to meet its clean air commitments under regulatory requirements. As of mid-2015, Seaboard Marine has sold well over 1000 Cummins “new-new” & new RECON marine engines, and to this day, tracks about 75% of them as to servicing & operational history.
“Tony’s wife, Donna (also dubbed “Queen Momma” by Tony) used to be the chief secretary and bookkeeper of the shop. After being a stay-at-home mom for 20 years to raise their two daughters, Leslie and Karin, she decided it was time for a change and came to work for Tony. Having been married to Tony since 1968 (high school sweet hearts) for 45 years, she considers herself an expert in the art of keeping Tony’s harried work schedule “do-able”, sometimes having to resorting to losing his truck keys on Sundays just to keep him at bay…
Now daughter Leslie and hubby, Corey, have joined the Seaboard crew allowing Tony and Donna some time to “goof off .” All of the crew at Seaboard are considered family and without that, would not be what it is today.