Correct Craft

Correct Craft is the oldest name in waterskiing, and it earned the name before the sport existed. Walter C. Meloon opened the Florida Variety Boat Company outside Orlando in 1925, renamed it in 1938, and in 1945 the yard answered the army's call for roughly four hundred storm boats to put troops across the Rhine — built in under a month, by a family that would not run the line on Sundays and delivered early anyway, as the company still tells it. In 1961 Meloon's yard bought a fiberglass hull, its molds and its name from Leo Bentz, and the Ski Nautique became the boat three-event skiing measured itself against for a generation.

On the used market the Correct Craft badge means the ski-era hulls — the direct-drive inboards of the seventies, eighties and nineties, before the Nautique name became a brand of its own. Scout watches 7 of them asking an average of $43,664, and the shelf holds 1 across 1 models, 1988, asking $11,000. That money buys a tow boat whose hull and hardware were built to outlast its price class, with one known enemy: wood. Through the eighties the stringers were timber sealed in fiberglass, and the owner forums — PlanetNautique, The Hull Truth, the CorrectCraftFan archives — treat rot in an unrestored eighties hull as the expectation, worst under the floor between the seats and at the transom, and accelerated by a tight cover steaming the bilge all summer. The defence, argued in the same threads, is that everything around the wood is superb and the repair is honest carpentry. Both sides send the buyer to the same place with a moisture meter, which is exactly the errand behind this one:

The company that built it turned one hundred in 2025 as a parent of brands: Nautique carries the modern wake flag, Centurion and Supreme came aboard in 2015, and the group runs its own engine houses besides. The family's stated mission — building boats to the glory of God — has ridden the letterhead through all of it.

Buy a ski-era Correct Craft if you want the purest pull and flattest wake a few thousand dollars can tow, and you can open the floor or pay someone who has. Skip it if you cannot inspect before buying, because on a forty-year-old inboard the badge guarantees the idea, not the wood. The rest of the tow-boat field musters on the wake and ski boats under $100k.

Sources: Correct Craft company history (correctcraft.com); Ski Nautique and Correct Craft entries, Wikipedia; owner threads on PlanetNautique, The Hull Truth and CorrectCraftFan.