Sportfishing boats
Sportfish boats for sale
Convertibles and offshore fishing boats — the hulls built to get to the canyon, fish it all day and bring everyone home comfortable.
A sportfisherman is built around the cockpit. Everything forward of it — the salon, the staterooms, the bridge — exists to let a crew stay out long enough to make the run worthwhile, and everything in it exists to fight a fish: a fighting chair or a full rocket launcher, freezers and livewells, a transom door and enough clear deck to work a fish round the corners.
The line people mean by "convertible" is the one with an enclosed salon and a flybridge over it, usually from about 40 feet up. Below that, express and walkaround sportfish boats do the same job with less accommodation and a lot less running cost. Above about 60 feet you are into custom and semi-custom territory, where the tower, the mezzanine and the engine package are as individual as the paint.
In the northeast these are tuna boats — Stellwagen, the Dump, the canyons off Nantucket. In Florida the same hulls run sailfish and dolphin out of Jupiter and Stuart, and a great many of them make the trip twice a year, which is a run Joe has made himself.
Who it suits
- Serious offshore fishing, where range and sea-keeping decide the day.
- Owners who want to fish two coasts and move the boat between them.
- Crews — there is room to sleep, feed and shelter people on a long run.
- Tournament programmes, where cockpit layout and tower are the whole spec.
Where we work
Where they fish from here
Stuart and Jupiter are the winter end of this run and New Bedford, Falmouth and Hyannis the summer end — the same migration Joe has made as a captain and a broker.
Builders
The yards we know in this class
The sportfish yards Guard Yacht Group knows and works with. A convertible is a big, specific purchase and the differences between these builders are real — worth a conversation before you start looking at listings.
Common questions
What people ask before they buy
- What is the difference between a sportfish and a convertible?
- A convertible is a sportfisherman with an enclosed salon and a flybridge above it, so the same boat converts between fishing and cruising use — that is where the name comes from. In everyday use people say "sportfish" for the whole family of offshore fishing boats and "convertible" for the enclosed-salon, flybridge ones specifically, which generally start around 40 feet.
- How much does a sportfish boat cost to run?
- Far more than the purchase price suggests, and it is the number to work out before you buy rather than after. Diesel at cruise, twice-yearly service on two large engines, dockage for a boat with real beam, bottom paint, insurance and — on most programmes — some help running it. Any broker who will not talk you through this honestly is not doing the job.
- Should I buy a sportfish boat in Florida or in New England?
- The boat matters more than the market, but the two do differ: Florida has far more inventory and boats that run year round, while a northeast boat has often had a shorter season and winter storage, with the maintenance history that implies. Guard Yacht Group works both ends of that run, which is the useful part — the comparison gets made across both markets rather than within one.