BOSTON WHALER 36
LOA: 36’5”
Beam: 11’3”
Draft: 32”
Weight: 18,281 lbs.
Max HP: 1,350
Price: TBD
Center consoles have been growing in popularity and size ever since Boston Whaler launched what is considered to be the first boat of this kind. The 16-foot Nauset—introduced in 1960 and the brainchild of company founder Dick Fisher and chief designer Bob Dougherty—was little more than an oversized dinghy, but with a difference. It sported a hand-built mahogany console and bench seat mounted in the center of the boat, with space to walk around both sides from bow to stern. It was simple, but in some ways it started a revolution in boat design.
Early center console models were basic fish boats with spartan layouts. The features that set them apart were the 360 degrees of walkable deck space and low-cost outboard power. These boats were relatively inexpensive to purchase, run and maintain. They were a blue-collar fisherman’s dream come true, simple boats for simpler times. Today’s center consoles are anything but, with propulsion, technology and amenities that would have been hard to imagine back in the 1960s. One of the first center console boats to push the LOA envelope was the Ocean Master 31, designed in 1974 by Mark Hauptner, an outboard dealer by trade. That boat was an outlier for many years, until the early 1990s when more production center
