Wellcraft

With most builders the company history is background. With Wellcraft it is the purchase decision, because which Wellcraft you are looking at depends less on the model than on who owned the name the year it was moulded. The brand started in Florida in 1955 building wooden runabouts, spent the eighties as one of the loudest names in American powerboating — the Scarab 38 KV that Sonny Crockett drove on Miami Vice was a Wellcraft product line, not a separate company — and then went through the wringer. Genmar bought it in the nineties; the era that followed is remembered by owners and by the trade press as the one in which the big Sarasota plant went dark, and Genmar Holdings filed for Chapter 11 in 2009. Platinum Equity bought essentially the whole of Genmar out of that bankruptcy for $70 million in 2010, assembled the survivors as Rec Boat Holdings, redrew the Wellcraft line for model year 2014, and sold the lot to Groupe Beneteau the same year: four brands, a plant at Cadillac, Michigan, about $150 million of revenue and 475 people.

Under the French owner the badge was pointed at one thing, offshore centre consoles called Fisherman, and the boats got good. The tests of the re-imagined 262 recorded 57.4 mph on twin 250 Verados and 30 mph in seven and a half seconds on a 21-degree bottom; Salt Water Sportsman took the 302 to 57.6 mph on twin 350s, 30 mph in the same seven and a half seconds through a two-foot chop, a 29 mph cruise and up to 460 miles of range on a 22-degree hull, at $201,685 as tested, and called it dry, stable and impervious to excessive pitch and roll. Neither reviewer found a fault worth printing. That is the boat this yard was building right up until June 2026, when Groupe Beneteau Americas and Rec Boat Holdings sent suppliers notice that production and distribution of Four Winns, Scarab and Wellcraft Fisherman were being suspended and that manufacturing at Cadillac would cease in the third quarter, citing cumulative 2024 and 2025 operating losses that were no longer sustainable and putting more than 230 people out of work. The name itself survives — Beneteau's list of seven brands to concentrate on still has Wellcraft on it — but the American centre-console line that built the boats below does not.

Which makes the two we hold artefacts of the last chapter rather than the next one:

Four feet longer and five model years later, the same argument with the bigger engines and the offshore range:

Scout watches 42 live Wellcraft askings, averaging $91,272, and publishes 2 of them across 2 of the yard's models, 2018–2023, asking $81,900 to $169,990. A badge that has changed hands this often does not have one used market, it has several stacked on top of each other, and the year on the transom is what tells you which company's decisions you are buying.

The honest notes come in two halves that have almost nothing to do with each other. On the older hulls the complaint is specific, old and well documented: owners and repairers on the boating forums describe late-eighties to late-nineties Wellcrafts built with wood the yard never sealed — limber holes drilled straight through stringers and left bare, non-marine plywood under glasswork too thin to keep water out, transom caps found rotted through — and they quote the economics of putting it right, roughly $2,500 to pull the engine and drive before $6,000 or $7,000 of components. Those boats are cheap for a reason and the reason is a moisture meter. On the recent hulls nobody is complaining about the laminate at all; the risk has moved to the other end, because the company that warranties them, supplies their parts and trains their dealers has just stopped making them. Both halves of that are true of the same badge at once, and they point a buyer in opposite directions: on a nineties Wellcraft you survey the boat, and on a 2023 one you survey the support — what the dealer says about parts, what the warranty is worth now, and how proprietary the mouldings and the rigging on that particular model are.

Buy one if you want a great deal of measured, tested boat for the money and you are the sort of buyer who prices risk rather than avoiding it — the offshore hulls of the last decade were reviewed as well as anything at their price. Buy elsewhere if you need a factory standing behind the boat for the next ten years, or if you are shopping the cheap old ones without the means to check what is under the deck. The two on our shelf are the 262 Fisherman and the 302 Fisherman; boats of the same size and job from every other yard are gathered on the center consoles under $100k, and the whole motor fleet on the powerboat shelf.