Roddy McCaskill, for years one of the top real estate agents in the state, retired in September 2015, but he couldn't endure retirement for long.
By February, he was looking for something else to do.
So he bought a sophisticated, $76,000 boat from a Florida company to clean weeds out of ponds, lakes and other waterways.
"I loved not being on the phone all the time," McCaskill, a consistent multimillion-dollar producer during his career that began in 1976, said of his retirement. "But I flunked retirement."
McCaskill, 63, has a lake behind his home in Carlisle and had problems with the growth of vegetation in it.
"I was tired of dumping chemicals in the lake," McCaskill said. "I thought there had to be a better way."
He saw an ad for the boat in February. He did research on it for several months and bought it in June.
It's a Weedoo TigerCat, built in West Palm Beach, Fla. It is 12 feet long and 7 feet wide. It has a 5-foot bar cutter that can cut vegetation 5 feet below the surface of the water and 5 feet above.
On the front of the machine is a tractor bucket that picks up the unwanted vegetation and can drop it on the shore.
"I wanted something low pressure that would fit my schedule, something where I could work for myself," McCaskill said.
He admits it was a pretty dramatic career change.
"But it really is invigorating to start a new business that is totally different from what I've been doing," he said. "The advantages are you get immediate results and you're not continuing to put chemicals in the water. It's very serene. You've got to be concentrating on what you're doing every second, so you don't have time to worry about anything. I enjoy what I'm doing."
Lee Smith, who worked on McCaskill's team for four years as a buyers' agent at Keller Williams and later at Aspire Realty, said McCaskill was among the top five selling agents in the state in the 12 years before he retired.
McCaskill sold homes with a combined value of $39 million in 2004 and about 250 homes valued at about $50 million in 2005 when he owned Roddy McCaskill Realty in Little Rock, McCaskill said.
"He was a spectacular mentor for me," Smith said. "Everyone in Little Rock and the surrounding area knew Roddy McCaskill."
She isn't surprised with McCaskill's new business and his new "toy."
"He's a hunter and an outdoorsman at heart," Smith said. "This fits him perfectly. This is his true heaven."
Beginning with his own lake, McCaskill has cleaned parts of waterways in places such as Hot Springs Village, Cherokee Village, Parkin, Mountain View, Maumelle, Marshall, off Arkansas 10 in Little Rock and at War Memorial Golf Course.
Bill Staggs, the public works director in Hot Springs Village, hired McCaskill to clean overgrowth of hydrilla, a weed growing in Lake Balboa, the largest lake in the village.
"We needed to have some of it removed so we could go into our next step of attack and try to get rid of this or at least control it," Staggs said. "It's isolated [on Lake Balboa] now. We shut off the ramp so the boats couldn't come in and out freely without our permission. We're trying to keep [the hydrilla] from going into the other lakes."
The job in Hot Springs Village "about did me in," McCaskill said.
"That was 2½ weeks of working from 7:30 a.m. until dark," he said.
Staggs called McCaskill a "steady Eddie" because he was "out there all day by himself."
"He did a great job of getting it done," Staggs said.
In The Ranch subdivision off Arkansas 10 in Little Rock, a 1-acre pond was so overgrown with alligator weed that people had trouble standing on the shore to fish, said Jim Strawn.
Strawn, who lives in The Ranch, suggested to the property owners association's board that they let McCaskill try out his boat.
"We were very impressed," said Strawn, who has known McCaskill for years. "When he gets going he can really move a lot of weeds."
McCaskill said some of his friends who know what he's doing now "think I've gone crazy."
But his wife, Martha, encouraged him to keep it up.
McCaskill's business, Water Weed Harvesting Inc., primarily sells the service to clean up waterways at $125 an hour, McCaskill said.
"It's very rewarding to take a pond or lake that is just a mess where people can't get out of their docks and can't fish," McCaskill said. "And then, to take that and turn it into something beautiful is cool."
SundayMonday Business on 11/13/2016