| Hargrave 97 |  |
When Champ, Lags and Eddie start talking about their boating experiences, it doesn’t take long until one of them bursts out laughing. "Hey
Champ," calls out Eddie, "remember the time you ran aground and out of gas at
the same time?"
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Champ responds with a sly, crooked grin. "I remember. Except I
thought you were driving," he lobs back. "The towboat guy said he’d never seen
that
happen before."
And on it goes, one funny memory after another.
 Dave Lageschulte and Dale Regnier. (Click image to enlarge)
And so it should. After all, Eddie Droste, Dave "Lags"
Lageschulte and Dale "Champ" Regnier can be said to have a corner on the fun
market. Droste was one of a group of six guys in Clearwater, Florida, who
invented the Hooters restaurant chain in 1983, as he says, "just so we could
have a place we couldn’t get thrown out of."
In 1986, two other buddies, Lageschulte and Regnier, bought the franchise
rights to Hooters South Florida. At last count they own more than 25 locations
of the now international chain of casual dining and sports bars renowned for
cold beer, hot wings and vivacious "nearly world-famous Hooters Girls." The trio
has also branched out into other ventures such as Adobe Gila’s Margarita Fajita
Cantina and the upscale Dan Marino’s Fine Food and Spirits. Separately, their holdings represent an
even broader array of restaurants.  Hooters, however, is at the core of their business, their
friendship, their fun and their yachting. This summer they took delivery of
their fourth jointly owned vessel, aptly named Hooter Patrol IV. (Click image to enlarge)
So how do three fellows buy and operate boats together and
still manage to remain friends? "You mean, how did we build a Picasso by committee? We’ve owned
boats together for ten or fifteen years," answers Droste, who hails from the
same Iowa town as Lageschulte. "We elect a new commodore every morning. That way
there’s never any debate about our cruising plan." Aboard Hooter
Patrol IV, however, cruising plans will be considerably
more extensive than in the past. At nearly double the length and triple the
volume of her predecessor, a 50-foot sport yacht, the new vessel has range to
patrol the Bahamas and Caribbean. So how does one, or in this case, three, make the jump from a
50-foot production boat to a 97-foot (29.6-meter) custom yacht? Well a man walks
into a bar. … In this case, the man walking into a bar was Champ Regnier
inspecting Hooters in Coconut Grove in 1991. Across the room he spotted Craig
Erickson, who quarterbacked the University of Miami Hurricanes to national
championships in 1989 and 1990. The two struck up a conversation that turned
into a friendship.
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