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.

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.