Well my drooling over the 255 Open has come to an unfortunate end. Went and looked at boats today at the boat show in Raleigh NC. After crawling all over various center console brands mostly 21 to 25ft, I wasn’t extremely impressed with the Scarab. I went there with intentions of confirming that was the boat I want, but not so sure now. The fit and finish was lacking, random caulk on hardware, yellow epoxy all over the anchor locker door in the front, dash felt like cheap plastic, steering wheel was cheap plastic feeling, center console seating was very awkward, tailgate took 2 people to get down, swim ladder is useless with tailgate down, and I question the longevity of those impact graphics that are on outside/inside of boat EVERYWHERE. Even my 13 year old made a comment about how it felt “plasticy” before I said anything. Now for the good, the layout was extremely nice for entertaining and the boat had more seating than any other 25ft center console by at least 2 fold. Same with the storage, lots of storage. No other center console even competes on those criteria. And I’m not on here to bash the Scarab but was disappointed to say the least. Wanted so bad to just see it in person and say yep, that’s the one. But for what they wanted for that boat you can get a lot of other nice options on other outboard center consoles. For example I saw a very well equipped Robalo R242 with a 300hp Yamaha felt better built and was a few grand less and ten years from now will still look relevant. It’s now on my short list.
I guess the search continues.
By the way the boat show only had a Scarab 255 Open, a small Scarab, 242 Limited & a 212X. I found it quite interesting that people would be looking at the jet boats and other people would walk by and say something to the effect of “you don’t want that it’s just a big jet ski”. Heard it 4 times from 4 separate groups. Still a lot of jet misconceptions, I guess.
