President

In 1982 the President 41 was the largest boat ever built in Taiwan, and the yard that built it was a family business Eddie Yeh had started in 1968 with its own slipway into the water. That boat met the American 1980s at exactly the right angle: a decade of buyers discovered that a Taiwanese yard would sell two staterooms, two heads, a flybridge and a hand-fitted Burma teak interior for the price of a Detroit sedan habit, and President shipped the 41 across the Pacific by the hundred. The yard never stopped — it builds 150-foot yachts today, some 1,200 hulls on from that first one — but the boats on this page are the import-wave boats, and they carry the import wave's whole argument on their decks.

The argument is that "Taiwan-built" was never one thing. The era coined the slur Taiwan turkey for the worst of it — scrap lumber behind pretty veneer — and the guides of the day put President in the other column: solid fiberglass semi-displacement hulls with a deep forefoot, a long keel standing guard over the running gear, marine-grade lumber where lesser imports hid packing crate. Owners on the trawler forums say the same thing four decades later. Then the same threads write the survey list, and it is the era's list exactly: teak decks screwed down through cored decks, where forty years of bungs and caulk decide what the moisture meter finds; fuel tanks of black iron that rust from the side you cannot see; and an electrical quirk noted across several 41s — two shore inlets behind a single 30-amp main, one of them unprotected. Good construction and a hard survey list are both true at once on these boats, which is the honest summary of the whole 1980s Pacific trade.

Scout watches 3 live President askings, averaging $65,165, and publishes 1 on the shelf, 1987, asking $52,495.

What the money buys is the startling part. The Double Cabin Motor Yacht is the two-staterooms-two-heads idea whole, with more hand-rubbed teak than anything built this century under half a million:

Buy one if you want the most interior and the most teak your money can reach and you will pay for a real survey before it moves. Walk away if you cannot budget for decks or tanks, because on a boat this age one of them is usually due. The same Taiwan decade at triple the money became a religion at Kadey-Krogen; the rest of the aft-cabin field is gathered on the motoryacht shelf, and the whole fleet on the powerboat shelf.

Sources: The Powerboat Guide (President 41 Double Cabin, 1982–87; President 37 Sundeck); President Yachts' own company history; Trawler Forum owner threads on the President 41 and 43.