Sea Ray Sea Ray 260 Sundeck

Sea Ray sold the 260 Sundeck as a deck boat; the test press kept filing it with the big bowriders. Both are fair, and the tension is the product: a wide-open bow lounge and enough cockpit to seat a party, sitting on the 21-degree deep-V bottom Knoxville put under its sportboats, so the boat that entertains at the sandbar can still take the lumpy run home. The head is in the console, the power is a single MerCruiser sterndrive, and the 8 ft 6 in beam means it comes home behind a truck without a permit. Tennessee-built, redrawn from the waterline up for 2013 — new deck, same bottom — and finally retired when Sea Ray renamed the whole idea SDX.

Scout watches 87 of them on the market, where the average asking sits at $42,456. Our own shelf is the narrow end of that: 1 published, $27,995, 2008. On a model this numerous price is never scarcity — it is which block went in the hole, what the outdrive has done since and whether anyone rinsed the boat after salt, so the money is settled in the service file rather than the asking.

An early hull carries a decade of somebody else's decisions, which is why one we keep the full file on is worth the drive before it is worth an offer:

The honest notes start at the throttle. Owners describe the 260 Sundeck as a heavy boat the standard 5.0 MPI does not move, and the advice on the forums runs to the 6.2 or one of the big 496 blocks; one review has the base package barely breaking 40 mph and reports the hull struggling under a full load even with more engine than that. The beam that makes it legal to tow does not make it easy — reviewers put the loaded rig at 6,800 to 7,300 lb on a tandem trailer, which is not the ramp afternoon its smaller sisters were. Reckon on eight or nine gallons an hour at a mid-twenties cruise: a tank is an afternoon, not a coastline. The sterndrive is a maintenance contract of its own — bellows, gimbal bearing, manifolds and risers, anodes — and on a hull this age that is where a survey earns its fee. Anyone planning to sleep aboard should be shopping express cruisers instead; the console head is the accommodation, whatever the listing calls the boat. The same money buys very different afternoons among the powerboats we publish.