Quote:
Originally Posted by RidgeRunner
You can give me one. Another one in fact to match my Circa 1983 Factory production to be sure but what a sweet hull. To each his own. 20' Scepter to a 20' Wellcraft is no camparison on interior space. In fact the 20 Wellcraft Cuddy has nearly what the 23 Scepter/ Tsunami has for cockpit space and that is why they are loved by so many. The little Wellcraft has seen a little of everything in the last 30 years. BTW- No sign of cracked hull or stringers causing hard spots, they went grid in about 1980, workmanship still sucked to be sure. Mine is a 60 MPH center console that I beat on fairly hard. Give me another one and I would do the same all over. Had they made the thing any better they would have gone out of business sooner.. err..   |
I think the V-20 and V-17 "Step-lift" were actually Alim Marine Hulls brought up from Miami to the Well-Crack plant in Sarasota in the '70's. They were originally designed by C. Raymond Hunt (Bertram, Boston Whaler, Grady White, etc) and molds were snatched up Well-Crack because the V-17 won the Miami to New York race in the early 60's. (I think it was piloted by a fellow by the name of Hewes) The V-20's were the longest run of any production boat made by Well-Crack. There was demand for them up to a couple of years before they closed for the reasons RidgeRunner states.
I had a V-17 with twin 50 Evinrude's. It started "wallowing" one day when we were out of sight of land. I opened the deck inspection port and the water was about 2" below the deck. I jump in the water with my mask on and there was a 3 foot longitudinal crack 16" above the keel. I scampered back in the boat, pulled the drain plug and the deck hatch, told everybody to get on the bow and mashed the throttles till they hit fiberglass. We finally plained off and I came yodeling through Pass-a-grille and slid it up on the ramp at Gulfport. After throughly cleaning out me wet suit pants, I pulled the console, cap and liner. They had 1" X 12" yellow pine stringers with tabbing turned up about 4". Everything as broken loose and the 1" X 12's were broken into pieces. I re-bedded fully encapsulated 2 x 12's on top of another glass matt liner, put everything back together and sold the boat and bought a Seacraft Safari. That's the Safari that Professor Conner Davis and I used to go "Runnin' and Gunnin" in back when they were changing the Loran Stations to the 7980 Chain in the Gulf and we were trying to capture TD's before they were gone. (1977)
I think the V-20's were built better than the V-17's. Sounds like RidgeRunner got one of the good ones. I was "over" with Well-Crack by then and moved on to Carl's SEACRAFT boats.