Matt is selling his DIY spa boat, complete with ‘wicked light show’

We first heard about Matt Keen and his amazing DIY spa boat nearly five years ago, when he was one of three winners in the Speight’s Unfinished Projects campaign.

It’s a great story – Keen, an engineer living in Bulls, custom-built a spa in a boat he dragged out of a river where it had been dumped. He spotted it while surfing at Himatangi Beach.

“My mates joked that maybe it could be repaired,” he said. “We saw all the water in the back and I thought ‘what about a spa pool?'”

Long story short – Keen undertook the project of his life, mounting the boat on a trailer he also got for nothing. At the time he joked the project took five years, two girlfriends, 15 mates and two hospital visits to finally knock off.

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“I had to go to hospital with a metal shard in my pinky, and later a metal splinter in my eye,” he said. “And there was a whole bunch of near misses.”

He succeeded, and he’s had loads of time to enjoy the spa boat over the past few years. But now he is selling it on Trade Me. The listing doesn’t expire till Sunday, March 20, 2022 at 8pm, but his reserve has already been met, and at the time of writing there have been 141 bids, with the current one at $2190.

Keen retains his sense of humour – in his listing he says he feels exhausted just thinking about all the effort it took to build the spa: “I zhuzhed up the entire boat (fancy way of saying, ‘do’er up’), chucked in a butt-kicking sound system, designed and built a cooler in the transom, and built a wicked light show system”.

He calls his spa boat “Spoat” (for short), and says he has spent another $1000 on it recently, getting a new WOF, giving it a “paint spruce up, new subs and head unit to name a few”.

“For the ease of use, I made it as user-friendly as possible,” he says. “Simply drive to your location of choice, wind down the trailer supports, chuck the hose pipe and LPG bottle onto their connections points, set the temp, turn on the tap and voilà, you have instant hot water filling up (approx. time 1 hour until full).”

The custom-built ice box cooler for the beers is made from an engine cowling that was widened, reclad and insulated with fibreglass. “There’s even a drainage hole in it. But there was about 24 hours of work in that small box.”

And, in case you are wondering, Spoat is economical to run. Keen says it uses approximately $1 worth of LPG in an hour (“or approximately 60 smiles per minute because that’s how stoked you will be”).