Regal

Regal buys its performance with hull shape rather than horsepower, and it stayed one family's company while most of its rivals became a conglomerate's brands. Paul and Carol Kuck started it in Orlando in 1969 on sixty thousand dollars of their own plus twenty thousand each from two friends, took the name out of a dictionary, and built twelve boats between fourteen and twenty-one feet in the first year; the 1973 fuel crisis nearly finished them and finished several competitors instead. Their children run it now. The decision that recurs arrived in 1995 as FasTrac — a stepped, air-entrapment bottom borrowed from offshore racing, with inverted strakes and side flow interrupters to keep the air trapped through a turn — and three decades later Boating still writes it as Regal's patented FasTrac hull rather than as a stepped hull, which is what happens when a yard develops a shape for a generation instead of replacing it. The cruisers got a shape of their own, OceanTrac, now OceanTrac2: a deep-V that Boating measured at a bluewater-worthy 21 degrees of deadrise at the transom on the 2026 34 SAV.

The other recurring decision is sitting in the name of two of the models we carry. A Window Express is a twenty-five to twenty-nine foot express cruiser with the glass moved into the hull side, so that the cabin of a boat this size is a room with a view of the water instead of a cave with a hatch — an idea Regal kept selling long after the fashion for it passed. BoatTEST's published figures for the 2565 make the case without any romance in them: a best cruise of 25.3 mph at 2.40 miles to the gallon, which is a hundred and fifty-six miles of range on a boat you can tow home and sleep four in.

The same idea one size up, in the 2860, buys a boat you stop trailering, and that is where most of these were sold:

Scout watches 454 live Regal askings, averaging $257,214, and publishes 2 of them across 2 of the yard's models, 2008–2019, asking $49,995 to $120,000. The useful thing about a builder that never sold is that the difference between any two of its boats is a decision rather than an accident of ownership: the same family signed off the express-cruiser cabin and the outboard bracket, so what separates one asking price from another under this name is era and equipment, not two different companies wearing one badge.

The most recent of those decisions is the one the whole industry made at the same time. Regal followed the market off the transom and onto the bracket, and the 29 OBX is the family boat redrawn around outboards — the deck plan of a cruiser with the engines outside it and the maintenance bill that follows:

The honest notes are not about the hulls, which test well, but about what is behind the trim. Boating's own testers, in a review that liked the LS6 Surf 2.0 enough to call it one of the best forward-drive boats they had run, filed under low points that its storage lockers revealed exposed wiring that could be damaged when loading gear, and exposed screw threads partially covered in caulk waiting to snag a bare hand — on a boat that stickered at $148,390. An owner on the iboats forum, listing five faults on a brand-new one including a cracked swim deck and fingerprints trapped under the gelcoat, concluded that Regal has zero quality control; other posters in the same thread pushed the blame onto the dealer, whose job it is to set the boat up, and onto the engine supplier, and one of them noted mildly that a couple of guys at his marina were questioning their new purchases too. Neither account settles the other, and both point a buyer at the same places: the lockers, the bilge, the back of the console, the underside of the seat bases. Regal's misses are behind the finish, not on it.

The step has a bill of its own. Boating found the FasTrac bottom paired with a forward drive could feel a tad twitchy as the driver initiated a turn, and on the YBW forum an owner discovered that his boat's step would not ride over the rollers of the trailer he had been sold — the lip on the hull catches, and he had to wait for several more inches of tide before he could launch at all. Nobody puts that in a brochure. And on the mid-2000s sterndrive boats there is an era problem that is not Regal's engineering at all. Volvo Penta's XDP composite drives, fitted across the industry in those years, are the subject of long forum threads about corrosion reaching the u-joints and gimbal bearing behind bellows that went through several revisions before Volvo dropped the drive entirely. It is the boat's era rather than the boat's builder, and it is the first thing a survey of a 2005 to 2008 Regal should identify.

Buy a Regal if you want a boat that was designed by people who had to live with the decision, and if you are the sort of owner who will open every hatch before the money moves rather than after. Buy elsewhere if you want the cheapest way onto the water — this yard has never competed there and its used prices know it — or if you need a boat whose drivetrain era you do not have to research. The neighbours in the same size and money are gathered on the cabin cruisers under $50k.