In the early 80’s, Mark was a performance boat enthusiast. He started out with a classic 17’ Hydrostream Vector and a 200 Merc. In two years he wanted to move up the ladder and bought Tim Seabold’s Mod VP race boat. In 1986 after playing around for a season of fun Mark decided to join the CBF racing association and go race his boat. In his rookie year Mark managed one win and fourth overall. Undaunted he went back for another year in Mod VP with a new Summerford STV. This time Mark moved up one position to third overall and realized this was not the right area for his style.

For 1988 Mark sold his MOD VP boat and replaced it with a 24 Skater cat powered with twin Mercury racing 2.4 offshore motors. The boat was named “TUFF n’ UFF”. This was a year of getting to know the boat and choosing a driver that would be in rhythm with Mark’s throttling. Dana, Mark’s girlfriend at the time became the unusual choice for the driver’s seat. And together the duo joined the APBA offshore racing association and raced the little Skater in the US.

Offshore racing was the missing piece of Mark’s racing desire and the music played. Success followed quickly for the Canadian team. They won the Divisional ‘C’ highpoints championship in 1989 with the Rookie of the year’ honors.

In 1990 they won the highpoints title again and they came second at the World Championship. During that time the team of Mark and Dana got married, a great team in the boat must make a great team in life as well.

In 1991 with their combined resources the team bought a 32’ triple engine Skater cat and moved to the National circuit in ‘Pro Stock’. They raced their ‘TUFF n’ UFF P-32 in the glory days of offshore with racing heroes and movie stars like Don Johnson, Kurt Russell and Chuck Norris.

Racing success continued for the duo with many more trophies’s and titles, National High points Champions, Divisional High points Champions, Kilo record holders. Racing life was good and it took them all over the United States and even to Japan. The pair had won driver of the year awards and Mark was considered by some to be one of the best rough water throttleman in the world.

After winning their class so consistently the only thing to do was to move up or move out. Since the next racing class up was the premiere level of ‘Class 1’ or ‘Open’ which cost ten times more to run then Pro-Stock, in 1994 team TUFF n’ UFF of Mark and Dana Weigl hung up their helmets.

In 1999 Mark got involved in the Poker run circuit when Graham Neal approached him on how best to make a killer Poker run boat package. The result was a 150mph 36ft Skater that had the distinction of being ‘The fastest production pleasure boat in the world’. Mark throttled and developed the ‘ALL RISKS’ for the two years that Graham owned it.

In hind sight this racing past was preparing the foundation for TUFF Marine and explains why the TUFF boats must always be true ‘High Performance Boats’.