Chris Craft Powerboats for Sale

Chris Craft

The powerboat yard Chris Craft is something like the archetype of American boatbuilding. Hardly any other yard still in existence today can look back on such a long history.

Chris Craft – an almost mythical name that Americans mention in the same breath as other heritage brands such as Harley Davidson, Schwinn or Ford and General Motors.

The shipyard's origins go back to 1876, when the two brothers Henry and Christopher Columbus Smith, still teenagers at the time, began building small fishing and hunting boats. Passion quickly turned into a business – and into a boatyard: Chris and "Hank" soon became known well beyond the banks of their home waters, the St. Clair River (Michigan), for their exceptional boat designs and craftsmanship.
Chris Smith, however, wanted more than "just" building a few fishing boats. Above all, he was interested in power boats, which had become fashionable among the wealthier water sports enthusiasts of the day. In 1906, Chris Smith built his first purely recreational powerboat (7.90 m long, 30 km/h). The boat soon won over an investor who ordered a considerably faster powerboat (48 km/h max speed) and immediately founded a shipyard together with Chris Smith (Smith-Ryan-Boat-Company). The yard's portfolio included fast planing boats known as the Baby Reliance, which "managed" up to 80 km/h. The price of these handcrafted wooden boats: around 20,000 dollars. That was when the yard was renamed "Chris Craft".

Up to 129 km/h

Over the following years, Chris Smith designed and built legendary powerboats that won the prestigious Gold Cup speed regattas several times with ease. The max speeds of Smith's boats, powered by aircraft engines, rose from 90 km/h to 129 km/h. Because the Smith powerboats were so unbeatably superior, the yacht club in charge eventually changed the Gold Cup's entry conditions and racing rules and imposed handicaps on the Smith boats.
That same year, the by now legendary boatbuilder Chris Smith handed over the fortunes of his yard to his two sons (Chris Smith and Sons Boat Company).
They, in turn, wanted to move into the really big business: instead of expensive one-offs, they established series production on an assembly line in the style of the early Ford plants. In a remarkably short two years, the yard became the most successful in the USA, and probably in the world.

In 1962, the Smith brothers finally retired and sold the shipyard for 40 million dollars.

An era ends – a new one begins

The winning streak continued. At first, the focus was on the in-house designed runabouts in every size and comfort class. The Smith brothers made sure that, alongside the luxury speedsters, the shipyard's portfolio also became more family-friendly. Legendary: the "Cavalier series" for "ordinary people". Building their own engines completed the manufacturing process of the production boats, which were still made of wood.
In the early 1950s, Chris-Craft expanded its product range with 139 powerboat models, and in 1955 the first boat made of fiberglass was produced. In 1971, an era finally came to an end when Chris-Craft built its last mahogany boat - a 57-foot Constellation.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Chris-Craft returned to a passion that had already been pursued extensively before the war: racing boats. Among other things, they built high-performance catamarans for the offshore powerboat scene and developed "tamed" speedsters for the hipster scene of the day with its taste for the thrill of speed. Spectacular and great for the brand image: the protagonists of the cult series Miami Vice raced to their "assignments" in a Chris Craft Stinger model.

During this period, more than four thousand people were employed at Chris Craft.

After several changes of ownership and bankruptcies, Chris Craft still builds high-quality powerboats in the USA for an international market today. In 2018, Chris Craft was taken over by Winnebago Industries.