South Bay

South Bay has built pontoons at Middlebury, Indiana since 1998, and its corporate address is the most interesting thing about it until you price the boats. The yard is a division of Forest River, the largest recreational vehicle manufacturer in the world, which Berkshire Hathaway bought in 2005 — making this, improbably, the Warren Buffett pontoon. The RV parentage is not trivia; it is the business model. Forest River's purchasing scale and dealer network let South Bay state its proposition out loud in the LE series: limited floor plans, limited colors, limited options, and a lower price because of it. Where the premium yards sell configurators, South Bay sells a finished decision.

The owner record is quietly better than the brand's modest fame. The forum threads run to people reporting years of use without spending a dollar past fuel, and warranty service described as generous when small things came up. The structure backs the talk: lifetime coverage on the tubes and below-deck welds, twenty years on the deck. But read that warranty like a used buyer, because it was written for a new one — the lifetime coverage belongs to the original owner and does not transfer. What follows the boat to you is the deck warranty and little else, so the headline that sold the boat new is not part of what you are buying used. The complaint file is thin but not empty: one documented Florida saga on Pontoon Forums — torn bimini, miswired gauges, a leaking center log — ground through dealer and factory management with more patience than resolution. And no boating magazine instrument-tests value-line pontoons from RV conglomerates, so there is no neutral stopwatch to cite on any of them: the evidence is owner testimony, the spec sheet, and your surveyor.

The one on our shelf wears the case well — a recent hull from the gentlest duty a pontoon can draw, short Minnesota freshwater summers and winter storage:

Scout watches 3 live South Bay askings, averaging $75,648; on the shelf itself the asking is $27,995, from 2022.

Buy a South Bay when the porch is the point and the badge is not — priced as a boat whose warranty stayed with its first owner. Start with the 220 Cruise LE, put it against the field on the pontoons under $50k, and the wider fleet is on the powerboat shelf.

Sources: South Bay Pontoon company pages; Wikipedia, Forest River Inc.; Pontoon Forums owner threads, including the South Bay 925 warranty thread.