Robalo

Robalo is a name that has changed hands four times and died once. The yard opened in 1969 on a 19-foot saltwater boat that was among the first sold on an unsinkable hull, passed to Cobia in 1982 and to Brunswick in 1991, moved to Tallahassee, and then simply stopped — production ran out in early 2001 and the brand was making nothing at all when Marine Products, the parent of the Chaparral runabout factory in south Georgia, bought it and restarted it with a couple of 23-footers. That transplant is the decision every modern Robalo is built out of. A high-volume sportboat plant took over a fishing brand and brought sportboat habits with it: structure moulded in rather than bolted on, standard-equipment lists long enough that the option sheet is short, and a hardtop with fixed windshields that is part of the console instead of an aluminium frame screwed to the deck. A boat test of the R272 called that hardtop an amenity usually found only on boats costing much more; another review of the same hull described the yard's approach as an overbuild-it attitude and pointed at oversized stainless hinges and a console carrying load to prove it. The tooling changed hands again in May 2026, when MasterCraft bought Marine Products and Robalo landed in a portfolio alongside Chaparral and the ski boats. None of which changes the used buyer's first question, which is older than any of the deals: a Robalo built before 2002 came out of a different factory, in a different state, under different management, and is a different boat from the ones the current reviews are about.

Scout watches 192 Robalos across the range, where the average asking sits at $147,136. What we publish is much narrower: the shelf covers 1 of their models — 1 published, $135,000, 2021. On a brand built in volume rather than in ones, an asking price is almost never scarcity. Model and year set the band; engine hours, rigging age and whether anyone rinsed the boat after a season in salt settle where inside it a particular hull lands.

The argument is easiest to see on the model the magazines actually ran:

The honest notes have to come from owners, because the press on this yard is lopsided: one published test of the R272 lists no weakness at all, and the only complaint in another is that the removable bow backrests are awkward to stow when it is time to cast. Magazine boats are factory-rigged and new. The forums are where the second owner's information lives, and what they report is not the hull but the joints and the finish around it — an owner of a 2018 Cayman 226 describing the console and T-top structure working loose from below the deck and flexing a couple of inches after 200-odd hours, T-top weld cracks argued over at two years, gelcoat stress cracking, and a cluster of complaints from the mid-2010s about the parts nobody photographs: screws and offcuts left in bilges, drains not properly sealed. An owner on the iboats forum tracked soft, flexing patches in the deck of a 2005 230R to flotation foam that had found a gap between deck and stringer while the boat was being built. Set that beside the tests and both readings survive: a console and hardtop moulded to carry load is a genuinely stiffer arrangement than a bolted frame, and a structure that carries load is one whose bond to the deck is worth a hard look — the praise and the complaint send you to the same square metre with your weight on it. Warranty is the other thing to read rather than assume. Robalo's own document runs the structural hull cover ten years for the buyer who ordered the boat but only five years from that same first delivery for the next owner, capped at the boat's book value and conditional on an ownership transfer record the first owner may never have filed — the owner chasing that 230R deck found exactly that wall. Anyone who wants hand-finished, semi-custom offshore work should be shopping a different kind of yard and a different kind of price. What this one sells is a lot of equipped, well-supported boat per dollar, which is also the reason the smaller and older hulls turn up among the center consoles under $100k, and the rest of the fleet on the powerboat shelf.