Crownline

There is a date that divides every used Crownline in two, and it is not a model change. The company was founded by its family in 1990 and the first boat, a 182BR, came off the line on 25 March 1991 in a small shop at Whittington, Illinois, with the upholstery being done in the gymnasium of an empty grade school; by that July it had outgrown the place and moved into the plant the Mark Twain Boat Company had used at West Frankfort. The founding family sold control to the private equity firm Pouschine Cook in 2007. In December 2008 that owner went looking for strategic partners and production simply stopped. Crownline was bought and restarted on 26 August 2009 by Leisure Properties LLC, and the part that mattered to the boats was that the old management came back with it — Kevin Riem returning as vice-president and general manager, alongside the finance chief and the director of manufacturing operations. Trade press at the time reported it as a yard getting back to building boats, which is exactly what it was.

It has just changed hands again. In June 2026 Whisper Marine — the boat-building arm of a Johnson City, Tennessee manufacturer whose other products are hot tubs, swim spas, cold plunges and utility vehicles — acquired the company, keeping the 360,000 square feet at West Frankfort and the existing dealers, with its chief executive calling Crownline one of the most respected names in American boatbuilding. Riem, still there after all of it, described the moment as pivoting from defence to offence. Whether that is true of the boats is a question for a few model years' time; what is already true is that a brand of ninety thousand hulls over thirty-five years now has a fourth corporate parent, and no two of them ran it the same way.

Scout watches 106 live Crownline askings, averaging $81,290, and publishes 1 across 1 of the yard's models, 2019, asking $39,950. Read the years before the price on this brand. A model year here is not only condition and equipment: it is which company had the plant when the hull was laid up, and which company's promises about it were still worth anything afterwards.

That is not a theoretical point, and an owner on the iboats forum put the bill on the table: a 2006 buyer whose warranty coverage ran out after two years when the manufacturer went through its collapse, with neither the dealer nor the company left to argue with. The hulls from the reopened company are the other side of the same coin — built by the same people, under an owner who had just proved willing to keep them:

The odd thing about the disagreement over Crownline is that it is almost never about the hull. The patented F.A.S.T. TAB bottom — fin-assisted safe turn — vents the chines to aerate the running surface and cut drag, with fin-like tabs whose job is to stop those vents producing handling quirks, over a Delta keel pad that helps it plane. A boats.com performance test of the 230 EX found no weak spots at all, called the fit and finish excellent and the ride equally impressive, and credited the vented hull with reversed chines for both spray control and grip in a turn. Owners say the same in less careful language: one reporting absolutely zero problems after more than ten years, another keeping a 1993 boat well past the usual replacement cycle because he could not find anything he liked as well. The 215 SS carries that bottom at nineteen degrees of deadrise, which is the shape of the whole argument in the size most people buy.

What the same forums fault is everything the hull is wrapped in. Glued-in carpet where rivals had moved on; more sizzle than steak, in one poster's phrase; a marina dealer principal who had never had anything nice to say about the brand, on interior materials and component specification; spec hardware and conservative engine options. On the older boats the complaints get structural rather than aesthetic — plywood deterioration on pre-1998 hulls, a 2000 boat with soft spots and cracking in the deck. And there is a federal record too: the Coast Guard logged a recall in May 2004 covering 1,291 boats of the 2003 and 2004 208 LX, 208 BR, 210 LX and 230 DB because a ground wire bonding the metal fuel tank had not been fitted on some of them, and it stayed open until March 2006.

Those two accounts are not really in conflict, and the useful reading is that they describe different halves of the same boat. Crownline has consistently been credited with a bottom that behaves and consistently faulted for what it specified above the waterline, which tells you where the money went and where it did not. It also tells you what to check, because carpet, trim and hardware are cheap to replace and a wet deck is not.

Buy a Crownline if the hull is what you are buying and you are content to upgrade the fittings on your own schedule, and buy the boats from the reopened company in preference to the ones either side of 2008 unless the price gap is large enough to fund the surveyor's findings. Buy elsewhere if you want a warranty you expect to still exist in five years' time — this brand has now tested that question twice — or if fit and finish is the thing you are actually shopping for, in which case the money is better spent elsewhere in the bowriders under $50k and the wider powerboat shelf.