Featured Project: Replacing Plastic Rod Boxes on an Osprey 30

The molded plastic rod box inserts found under the gunwales of many saltwater fishing boats serve their purpose but leave considerable room for improvement. They’re ugly right out of the box and gradually deteriorate with UV exposure, turning yellow, dull, and brittle over time. Plus, rod racks aren’t always what’s needed. 

For some boat owners, other kinds of storage — tackle trays, for instance — would be more useful. Brian Trumbull, an avid San Francisco Bay area angler, recently replaced the battered old plastic inserts on his 30-foot pilothouse boat with King Starboard storage units custom-designed to meet his needs.

Trumbull’s boat, a 2001 Osprey 30, is just about the perfect platform for the fishing he does — halibut trolling in the bay, salmon trolling and mooching in late spring and early summer, and then running as much as 60 miles offshore to chase albacore and bluefin tuna in summer and fall, often spending a night or two on the tuna grounds. 

“I just wanted everything nice and clean,” he says.

With the old plastic inserts removed, Trumbull was left with a pair of large rectangular cutouts in the sides of the cockpit. The question was what to put in them. Boat Outfitters does offer several pre-designed Starboard under-gunwale rod boxes, but none of them fit Trumbull’s cutouts. 

At the top of Trumbull’s wish list was tilt-out storage for Plano-style tackle trays. “I just didn’t need gaff and brush storage on both sides,” he says.

So, with input from veteran Boat Outfitters project manager Jason Strub, he designed a box for the starboard side to hold two Plano 3730 deep tackle trays and one shallower 3700 tray. 

The shallower tray was needed to accommodate the boat’s fuel fill hose, which runs behind it. At the aft end, an open cubby was added with an opening to mount a downrigger plug and extra room for small, frequently used items like gloves, a hand towel, and bottles of scent.

For the port side, Trumbull and Strub came up with a box designed to hold two gaffs or rods plus a short-handled bait net and a fish bat. An opening for a downrigger plug was added at the aft end.

The only hiccup in the process came when Trumbull saw how clean the tackle box unit looked with its Starboard door and stainless steel latches and started to think about adding a door to the gaff box. Not only would it provide a cleaner look but it would eliminate the possibility of crewmembers accidentally hooking their legs. The issue was that the gaff box was already in production.

“No problem," Strub said, and got started designing a retrofit door for the box.

The remaining challenge was how to route the downrigger power cable from the plug inside the box to the downrigger itself. Trumbull found a plastic fitting on Amazon he thought would work and tested it at home on a piece of plywood. 

It worked perfectly, and he shared the dimensions with Boat Outfitters so an opening could be cut for it in the door. The result is a nearly water tight pass-through for the cable.

Actually installing the boxes was the easy part. “They fit perfectly,” Trumbull says. “No trimming, no cutting, no nothing.” Installation was a matter of marking and drilling fastener holes, running a bead of marine sealant, and driving the screws. 

The functionality and appearance are exactly what he imagined. “They killed it,” he says. 

Original plastic under-gunwale rod box inserts can be replaced with a wide variety of storage types, depending on footprint and depth. Tilt-out storage like Trumbull’s is a popular option, as is rod storage — although Boat Outfitters CNC-cut Starboard rod racks hold rods much more securely than molded plastic boxes.

New under-gunwale storage was only a small part of Trumbull’s 2025 refit. The whole project started when he learned that the boat’s original Volvo Penta diesels were losing compression and nearing the end of their service life.

That left him with a difficult decision:

1. Sell the boat
2. Rebuild the engines
3. Repower with new diesels
4. Repower with outboards

Because the boat worked so well for him, selling it wasn’t really on the table. Instead, he settled on the most complicated and costliest route — converting to outboards.

His only real complaint with the boat was its speed; with the diesels, he cruised in the low 20s, which made the trip to the tuna grounds around four hours each way. The diesels under the cockpit floor were also loud. Outboards would significantly increase cruise and top-end speeds while at the same time reducing noise levels in the cockpit and pilothouse.

The only significant drawback was the amount of work involved in the conversion — pulling the diesels, sealing the outdrive openings, reinforcing the transom, modifying the fuel system, and installing a transom bracket.

As an experienced DIYer, though, Trumbull could do much of the work himself, saving a good deal of money. He found a buyer in Alaska for the diesels and got to work. After the transom knees were fabricated and the outdrive holes glassed over, he installed a new bracket built by PDR Marine Fabrication and then bolted on a pair of Honda’s new BF350 V8 outboards. The results were remarkable; the Hondas push the boat to a top speed of just over 50 mph and an easy 30 mph cruise, all while burning less fuel than the diesels.

For far less money than he would have spent on a new boat, Trumbull ended up with something even better: a great hull already fully rigged and dialed in for his home waters and fishing style; a new power package; and lots of great upgrades like this under-gunwale storage project.