NauticStar

NauticStar's whole product is a refusal to choose. The yard built its boats in Amory, Mississippi — a town four hours inland from the Gulf, which is its own small comment on the market it served — and the model that defines it is the one badged Hybrid: a bay boat with enough deadrise and freeboard to run outside on a decent day, sold under the price of the brands that only do offshore. Florida Sportsman's test of the 251 found the idea worked, reporting that it handled two-to-three-foot swells with ease and returned 3.3 miles to the gallon at thirty, a figure the reviewer called exceptional for the class. That is the house style stated plainly, and it is a real answer to a real question: most people who fish do it in a bay most of the time and outside occasionally, and buying two boats for that is absurd. The company that sold that answer, though, has changed hands faster than the boats wear out. MasterCraft bought NauticStar in late 2017 for $79.8 million and sold it to Iconic Marine Group — the Fountain and Donzi people — on 2 September 2022. A tornado hit Amory in 2023 and took a bite out of the plant's capacity. In March 2025 the remaining workforce was told the factory would close by the end of May and production would move to Washington, North Carolina. Three owners in eight years and a factory eight hundred miles from the one that built the boats now on the used market.

Scout watches 13 live NauticStar askings, averaging $77,747; what we publish covers 1 of their models, asking $44,450 across 2021. Whatever those figures read on the day, the thing to hold on to is where this brand was built to sit — under the offshore specialists, over the aluminium boats — because a boat designed to a price is a boat that has been decided about, and the decisions land in the same places on every hull.

It shows up as finish and hardware rather than as structure, and owners are specific about it. The recurring complaints are gel-coat cracking, hatch hardware that feels cheap, and thin console storage. More seriously, an owner reported a hole opening in his deck beside a deck plate and traced it to an air void left under the finish layer when the part was moulded — a defect of process, not of design, and the kind that only shows itself years later. A second owner with a 2014 boat described a cracked deck and fibreglass separating near the battery well, submitted it under the lifetime hull warranty, and had the claim refused on the grounds that those items were not covered. That refusal is more instructive than the crack. The lifetime limited hull warranty is the brand's headline reassurance and it covers the hull structure, not the deck you stand on, and the distinction is exactly where these boats are reported to fail. Set it against a boat like this one:

Against all of which stands the thing the reviewers keep finding, which is that the boats work. The tests praise the rough-water manners, the fuel numbers and the deck layout, and they are consistent about it across models and years; what none of them say is anything critical, and that is itself worth knowing — the press on this brand is a run of positive tests with no serious dissent in it, so the case against comes entirely from owners and the case for comes entirely from reviewers, and the two populations are not talking about the same part of the boat. The reviewers are describing a hull and a layout. The owners are describing gel coat, mouldings and a warranty department. Both can be right, and the buyer's job is to buy the first and inspect the second: run a hand and a moisture meter over the deck, open every hatch, look hard at anything moulded around a fitting, and price the boat as if the warranty were not there, because for a used hull under a third owner of the brand it very nearly is not. Buy one to get a genuinely versatile fishing platform at a price the specialists do not reach. Buy elsewhere if the reassurance you are paying for is a company that will still be answering the phone in the same building in ten years. The design our own boat belongs to is the 211 Hybrid, and boats of this size and money sit with the rest on the center consoles under $100k and on the powerboat shelf.