Boat brand guides

Sea Ray boats

Sea Ray is the biggest name in American boating — for decades the best-selling fiberglass boat brand in the country, with a lineup that runs from 19-foot runabouts to 40-foot cruisers.

Boston Whaler boats

Boston Whaler is the premium name in American fishing boats, and its reputation rests on something literal: the hulls are filled with closed-cell foam and famously 'unsinkable' — the company built its legend by sawing a Whaler in half and driving both halves away.

Bennington boats

Bennington is the best-selling pontoon brand in America, built in Elkhart, Indiana — the pontoon capital of the world.

Sea-Doo boats

Sea-Doo, built by Canada's BRP, is the best-selling personal watercraft brand in the world — it out-sells Yamaha's WaveRunner and Kawasaki's Jet Ski lines combined in most years.

Tracker boats

Tracker invented the idea of the affordable, ready-to-fish package boat in 1978 — one price for boat, motor, and trailer, sold through Bass Pro Shops.

Yamaha boats

Yamaha has been building watercraft since the 1960s, but two products define the brand for used buyers in the U.S.: the WaveRunner, which Yamaha introduced in 1986 as the first sit-down personal watercraft, and the jet-drive sport boat line that grew out of it in the late 1990s.

Bayliner boats

Bayliner started in 1957 outside Seattle and became the highest-volume fiberglass boat builder in the world by selling complete, affordable packages: boat, MerCruiser or Mercury power, and trailer, all through a huge dealer network.

Sportsman boats

Sportsman Boats is the young name on this list: founded in 2011 in Summerville, South Carolina by Tommy Hancock, who had already built Sea Pro and Sea Fox into major center-console brands.

Grady-White boats

Grady-White has built boats in Greenville, North Carolina since 1959, and for most of that time it has been the benchmark for a certain kind of buyer: the coastal family that fishes seriously but wants a dry, comfortable ride and a boat that will still be worth money in fifteen years.

Malibu boats

Malibu Boats started in 1982 in Merced, California, building direct-drive ski boats, and grew into the largest towboat manufacturer in the world, now based in Loudon, Tennessee.

Lund boats

Howard Lund built his first aluminum boat in New York Mills, Minnesota in 1948, and the company is still there, still building the boats Upper Midwest anglers trust.

Harris boats

Harris has built pontoons in Fort Wayne, Indiana since 1957 — the company that started as Harris FloteBote is one of the oldest names in the segment — and it sits in the premium tier alongside Bennington.

MasterCraft boats

MasterCraft has built towboats in Tennessee since 1968, when it was founded to make a better slalom boat, and the ProStar it produced became the tournament standard for a generation of water-skiers.

Stingray boats

Stingray Boats has been built by one family in Hartsville, South Carolina since 1979, which makes it a rarity in an industry of conglomerates.

Crownline boats

Crownline has built fiberglass sport boats in West Frankfort, Illinois since 1991, and it earned a following for a specific combination: aggressive styling, deep cockpits, and an interior finish a notch above the volume brands at a price a notch below the premium ones.