Pursuit

Pursuit is a fishing brand that was drawn inside a yacht yard, and it has never entirely stopped building like one. Leon Slikkers started as a Chris-Craft carpenter in 1946, sold a house to found Slickcraft in the mid-1950s, sold that to AMF in 1969, and built S2 Yachts on what was left of the idea; Tiara arrived in 1976 and Pursuit, the sportfishing line, a year or two behind it. Production moved to Fort Pierce, Florida in 1983, where it still is. The habit that came with the pedigree is structural rather than stylistic: hand-laminated multidirectional knitted glass instead of woven roving, vinylester resin below the waterline against blistering, a solid bottom with cored hull sides and decks, internal stiffeners of fibreglass filled with foam, and on modern hulls a resin-infused structural grid with a moulded-in knee at the transom to spread engine thrust down the boat. The other habit is systems — this is the yard that developed a livewell with an oceanographic institute to keep offshore bait alive longer. Reviewers of that era did not hedge: a magazine test of the 2870, the 24-footer's bigger sister, ends on the line that it is mighty tough to find a better-built boat, and a test of the 3370 Offshore found fit and finish well above average. In 2018 the Slikkers family sold Pursuit to Malibu Boats for $100 million and kept Tiara, so a recent hull carries a different corporate parent from an older one, which is worth knowing and is not, on the evidence, worth panicking about.

Scout watches 197 Pursuits, averaging $316,178 over a range that runs from twenty-somethings to forty-plus-foot express boats — so read that average as a fact about the mix, not as a price of entry. Our published shelf is the other end of the telescope: 1 of their models, 1 published, $24,000, 2001. The useful thing about a yard whose new boats sell at the top of the outboard market is that the cheap way in exists and is old: someone else has already paid the depreciation, and what is left to buy is condition.

Which is exactly what the entry point into this brand looks like:

The honest notes on the 2470 and its contemporaries are specific, expensive and well documented. Owners on The Hull Truth have taken these boats apart over fuel tanks: a compartment that was not bulkheaded the way the drawing called for, a hole the size of a coin letting fuel-soaked foam sit against the tank, and a replacement that meant cutting the deck out — one invoice quoted at $6,000, others costing roughly ten dollars a gallon of capacity plus thousands in labour. On the Pursuit owners' forum the complaint runs differently and is worse for being intermittent: fuel odour in the cabin, attributed to permeation of the plastic tanks used until about 2010, which the yard addressed under warranty with a sealed bulkhead and a vent fan. Owners there advise buying either a post-2010 boat or one that has had the fix and can prove it. The reported transom problems are the same story from the other side — rusted aluminium transom caps, water tracking in, coring wet where a fitting was never resealed. Both accounts of this yard are true at once. It was built solid, and it was built shut: hand-laid glass, cored sides and decks, tanks and structure moulded in for strength rather than for access. That is the whole calculation on a hull of this vintage — the boat will outlast the money if the seller can show what has been opened, and it will eat the money if he cannot, because the warranty that once covered the hull and deck for five years and transferred with the boat expired long before this generation reached the brokerage. What the buyer is paying for is a survey, and the survey list is short and known: tanks, coring, transom, and the nose in the bilge. The evidence on hulls built since the sale to Malibu is thinner than anything above — the owners' forum thread asking whether quality held under the new parent sat unanswered — so a recent Pursuit is bought on press reviews and dealer record, not on a long owner history. Boats of this size at the affordable end of the market — this yard's older hulls among them — fill the center consoles under $100k, and everything else we hold under power is on the powerboat shelf.