- October 1, 2024
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Scott Cornelius always knew he wanted to be a boat captain.
And for the last 10 years with The Good Life Charters, he's been living that dream.
Scott and Ashley Cornelius, owners of the Tomoka Outpost at Tomoka State Park, opened The Good Life Charters in 2014, celebrating their ribbon-cutting with the Ormond Beach Chamber of Commerce on Oct. 2 of that year, which also happened to be the couple's wedding anniversary. At the time, Scott owned a landscaping business, and it had been his goal to obtain a captain's license before he and his wife started a family.
He also specifically wanted to run his charter business from Tomoka State Park — and this was before he and Ashley purchased Tomoka Outpost from former owners Billy and Dani Talo.
"I remember telling my dad, I was like, 'I'm going to go down in history as a boat tour guide at Tomoka State Park,'"
Scott recalled. "He got a little chuckle out of it, and so I went into detail. ... What's the difference between me and those guys in the old wooden boats back in the early 1900s showing people the Tomoka River?"
As someone who was born and raised in Ormond, Scott said that was cool to think about.
He got his wish: To date, The Good Life Charters is the only legally permitted fishing and tour boat to operate from the state park.
About a year after launching their charter business, after a frustrating week with Scott's landscaping business, Scott suggested to Ashley that they go out on the river to relax. They drove to the Tomoka Outpost, backed their boat into the river and before Scott got out of his truck, Billy Talo came out and informed him that he and his wife were ready to retire. He wanted the Corneliuses to buy the business.
Scott and Ashley had built a friendship and partnership with the Talos.
"To think back to where it all started to where we are now with The Good Life Charters and the doors that it has opened up for us, it's pretty wild," Ashley said.
Scott still uses the same 1991 pontoon boat he first purchased for his business 10 years ago. He has worked on it over the years — including a total rebuild in 2020 during the pandemic shutdowns. Initially, the Corneliuses offered mostly fishing charters, but today, the tours are mainly pleasure cruises.
Through the years, Scott has been on TV shows like Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, Flip My Florida Yard with Chad Crawford and wrote the local paddling portion about Tomoka River in the "Paddler's Guide to the Sunshine State." He's also taken a presidential chef and Navy generals on boat tours.
But most of the people who take the tours are locals — particularly ones who have done a tour in the past, and return when family members are in town.
"There's two things about my tours I like more than anything," Scott said. "For one, you can't look up the information I share online because I'm born and raised within a mile of the park, so a lot of it is firsthand knowledge. ... The second one is you can't fact-check me because you can't look up any of it online. It just makes people laugh. It's a unique sample of the area in a way that you're not going to be able to find any other way."
The boat charter business and the Outpost have also allowed the Corneliuses, who now have two children, to raise the family in "The Good Life."
"That's the life we wanted to live, a life on the water," Scott said. "What we didn't realize was how defined that name would actually become once we ended up with the Outpost and the whole world of park life, water life and everything. This has been my ultimate dream in the world."
