Sailfish

Sailfish sells a drawing and a laminate schedule. The drawing is the variable degree stepped bottom the yard has built its whole identity on — three running surfaces stepping down through twenty-four, twenty-three and twenty-two degrees, so the boat is meant to land on the sharp part and sit on the flat part. The laminate schedule is the promise that there is no wood anywhere in it: composite stringers built up foam-filled and set into the hull, a transom cored in high-density foam board rather than plywood. Paul Hoppes founded the company in 1986 with no boatbuilding experience behind him and built it on exactly that pitch, at Cairo, Georgia, under the Seminole Marine name. What is striking, reading twenty years of press on this yard, is that every tester repeats those two claims and not one of them has checked either. Reviewers measure what reviewers can measure — speed, fuel burn, sound, where the spray goes — and the deadrise progression and the wood-free structure arrive on the page the way they arrive from the yard, as a specification. That is worth naming, because a boat sold on how it is built is asking a buyer to take on trust the one thing a sea trial cannot show him. The people making the promise have also changed: Hoppes sold the company to a private-equity firm in 2017, an outside chief executive arrived in 2020, and the founder died in 2026.

Scout watches 74 Sailfish hulls, averaging $181,411 across a catalogue that now reaches into the thirties. Our published shelf is the older and cheaper end: 1 of their models, 1 published, $69,995, 2007. This is a value brand at the new-boat counter, so the second-hand market for it is not a discount on a luxury — it is a discount on something that was already priced to be bought, and that compresses the distance between a good example and a tired one until only a survey can tell them apart.

The hull the magazines actually put a stopwatch on is the one we hold:

Set that verdict beside what owners of the same hull say and the page earns its keep. A man who moved from a 2007 2660 to a Cobia reports on The Hull Truth that the Cobia is a dry boat and the Sailfish soaking wet; early walkaround versions of the model cavitated in a following sea because the engines sat too high, which the yard corrected on later production by dropping them and changing props. Both of those can be true alongside a magazine's soft-landing verdict, because a hull that lands softly by putting a sharp entry into the water is a hull that throws what it displaces somewhere, and where that goes depends on trim, engine height and how hard the boat is being driven — which is why the same reviewers who praise the ride also complain about it: Boating's tester of a larger model wanted a higher bow angle and more slide in a hard-over turn, and noted it ran flat without tabs. The rest of the reported faults are unglamorous and fixable — wiring described as a jumbled mess under the console, gas smell after a fill on mid-2000s hulls, one fuel-tank replacement that took an owner three months — and the recalls on record against the builder are small level-flotation actions from the 1990s and 2000s, compliance paperwork rather than hulls failing. Which leaves the construction claim, and the single fact that should govern how a used buyer treats it. The ten-year structural warranty that stands behind the no-wood stringers and the foam transom extends only to the first retail purchaser. It does not transfer. Anyone buying a 2660 or any other Sailfish on the brokerage is therefore buying the yard's central argument with no paper behind it at all, and the survey has to do the work the warranty would have: stringers, transom, tank, in that order. Do that and this is a lot of well-drawn offshore hull for the money, which is what the yard has always been for. Skip it and you have bought a specification. Where the same money goes at a yard whose complaint list runs the other way, see Cobia; boats of this size and vintage fill the center consoles under $100k.