What the doctor ordered.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: Physician Tennant Teeter's custom-made boat for $200,000

Tennant Teeter was 30 when he first saw the ocean, 31 when he went fishing in the Gulf Stream and 33 when he bought his first boat.

The mountain-born, Morehead City obstetrician made up for lost time. After realizing the limitations of the 25-foot Robalo center console he'd bought, he moved up to a 34-foot, double-diesel Luhrs. But while Teeter was braving the blue Atlantic with ever bigger and better boats, his family was left high and dry in an aluminum-sided starter home.

Finally, Teeter made what many a fisherman would call the ultimate sacrifice: With payments on his sportsfisher running $1,150 a month, he sold it to build the house his wife had been dreaming about. Then, four days later, it hit him: "I suddenly realized I did not have a boat." By the end of the day, he'd bought another Luhrs over the telephone.

His new boat was just as big as the old one, but Teeter had to compromise. Though it had two engines, they were gasoline-powered. And to tell the truth, Teeter never felt a 34-foot boat was big enough to get the job done when the job is catching prize-winning billfish 50 miles out in the Atlantic. Nor was the 25-foot Grady-White he bought next or the 11-foot-wide, 28-foot-long custom sportsfisherman he had after that.

It took him seven years to figure out how to get his dream boat. To do it, the doc didn't just build a boat. He built a business.

Now 45, Tennant Teeter was born in Marion, a town of 4,300 between Asheville and Morganton. His father was an executive with Marion Manufacturing before it was acquired by J.P. Stevens. As a boy, he fished the trout streams of McDowell County with rods he'd wrapped and flies he'd tied. Some of the fondest memories of his years at Carolina, where he earned his undergraduate and pharmacy degrees, are of lying on his belly in the rushes, poaching largemouth bass from some farmer's pond.

After getting his pharmacy license, he spent a year behind a drugstore counter to earn money for med school. After four more years at Chapel Hill, he did his residency in Richmond at Medical College of Virginia, part of Virginia Commonwealth University. After graduation, he and his wife, Pam, who was his high-school sweetheart, decided they wanted to live somewhere on the coast, preferably back in North Carolina.

They went on a road tour to check out cities near the coast, including Southport, Wilmington, New Bern and Morehead City, which was last," Teeter says, "and we chose it because we liked the people here, and I could see the Atlantic Ocean from the top floor of the hospital."

Teeter decided to strike out on his own rather than join a group practice: "My wife and I took a relative risk coming here and setting up a practice." He says, though, that he and his wife, who handled the business end of the office, enjoyed setting up shop. We had to learn basic bookkeeping procedures, how to hire and fire people, how to get financing and other things that neither I nor my wife had had any experience with whatsoever."

Another exciting experience for the new doc on the block was offshore fishing: "I wasn't here a month before I went out to the Gulf Stream in a 22-footer with a single outboard. ... We went out, and we caught fish and got seasick, but we had a blast."

That was in 1977. Within a year, he bought his own vessel. For a first boat, it wasn't anything to sneeze at. His Robalo was equipped with Lorain navigation, a two-way radio, a 130-gallon fuel tank and a 235-horsepower Johnson. At first, it was plenty of boat. The semi-V-bottomed fiberglass hull provided a safe if rather rough ride. For four years, he and his buddies caught mackerel, wahoo, dolphin, an occasional tuna and more bluefish than they knew what to do with.

In 1982, Teeter was invited to join a weeklong effort at winning Morehead City's Big Rock Blue Marlin Fishing Tournament. The captain of the 42-foot custom sportsfisher picked the right man. Teeter connected with a 400-pound marlin that took first place. But more than the marlin got hooked.

Teeter fell in love with...