A Brief History of the Center Console

How an Electric Screwdriver Changed the Course of Boating History

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The author is editor and publisher of the recently launched outlet Center Console Angler. This veteran fishing journalist has continuously owned at least one center-console boat since 1980, sometimes two and occasionally three at a time. He has long been a disciple of the center-console lifestyle.

I distinctly remember the first center-console boat I ever saw. It was in south Miami in the mid-1960s, and I was in elementary school. While driving along Coral Reef Drive one day, my father spotted the boat sitting on a trailer beside a gas station on U.S. l. He immediately did a highly illegal U-turn and pulled into the station.

The shiny new Aquasport, probably a 17-footer, sat on a trailer and dad repeatedly circled the boat, shaking his head, saying, “This makes so much sense.”

At that point, we owned a 22-foot aluminum DuraCraft with an enclosed bow, a windshield, and a helm to starboard. It had a pretty big cockpit, but we were light-tackle fishermen, and like all boats with enclosed bows, it left something to be desired when you had a big fish hooked up. I remember scrambling over the windshield to the bow many times while fighting a dolphin or a kingfish. We didn’t think about the inconvenience, that’s just the way it was.

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But suddenly, an incredibly practical alternative had appeared. Now you didn’t have to crawl over an obstacle course while fighting a fish because you had clear passage 360 degrees around the boat. It seems like a simple thing now, and we all take it for granted, but back then it was a very big deal. It took a few years for us to get our first center console, a 22 Mako that Dad bought in 1971, but our family has owned at least one center-console boat ever since.

The center console existed long before that day in Miami, of course. Great debate centers on precisely when and where someone built the first one and who built it. In New England, dory boats served as marine workhorses for decades before the true center console appeared, and some of them had rudimentary center helms. And Chris Craft built center helm runabouts as early as the 1930s. But a centered helm does not a center console make. These boats lacked the defining feature of the true center console, namely the ability to move freely from bow to stern.

In researching this story, the name Scopinich came up repeatedly. This famous boat-building family from Long Island, New York, built a plywood 22-foot runabout in the early 1950s called the “Scop Cruiser,” powered by six-cylinder Gray 109 inboards. Early versions of the boat did not feature a center console, but an accident in the boatyard changed that.

In 1952, a huge electric screwdriver fell off a second story platform in the boat building shed and went right through the deck of a Cruiser being built below. Luckily, no one was injured, but the boat now had a huge hole right in the middle.

Being resourceful craftsmen, Fred Scopinich Sr. and Jr. went to work repairing the boat, and instead of installing the usual forward, off-center helm, they built a box out of plywood and positioned it in the center of the boat, attaching the helm to the box. They immediately recognized the innate practicality of the design and began using the boat in the waters around Long Island.

The boat instantly drew attention from admiring boaters in the area, and soon, representatives from the Douglaston Yacht Club of Great Neck darkened the doorway of the Scopinich yard and commissioned them to build six center consoles, which the club would use as tenders. The Scop Cruiser may well be the first true center console built on a semi-production basis.

Another milestone occurred when Dick Fisher formed Boston Whaler in 1958. The first Whalers were the famous 13-footers that Fischer sawed in half in the best boat ad ever, and they weren’t center consoles. In 1961, Whaler introduced the 16-foot Nauset, with the beautiful mahogany center console that became a legendary Whaler trademark on many subsequent models. The Nauset is generally considered to be the very first production center-console boat.

Chris Craft introduced a center console lapstrake boat called the “Dory” in 1962, and Aquasport began producing fiberglass boats in ’65 or ’66. Carl Moesly built the first center console Sea Craft in 1966, putting a center console on a bow rider hull. Moesly invented the famous Sea Craft variable deadrise deep-vee hull in ’62 or ’63 and received a patent on it a few years later.

In 1967, Bob Schwebke founded Mako Marine after he couldn’t find a boat that he liked, building a 19-footer to use in the shallow waters around Flamingo in extreme south Florida. Bob Hewes began producing center console flats skiffs in the late ’60s, and although Willy Roberts had been building custom center console skiffs out of wood for years in the Florida Keys, the Hewes Bonefisher was the first fiberglass, production flats skiff. Companies that introduced center consoles in the late 1960s or very early ’70s include Pro-Line, Robalo, Formula, Bertram and others.

The center-console design became so popular that Sports Illustrated magazine ran a feature about the phenomenon in 1969.

Also in ’69, Schwebke hired a young marketing director named Bill Munro, and in 1970, Munro put on the very first Mako Owner’s Toumament. He led a small fleet of 17, 19, and 22-footers to Walkers Cay in the Bahamas, and the modern owner’s tournament was born. These owner’s events became hugely popular, helping catapult Mako to the top of the center-console market in the ’70s and ’80s, but they did something else of arguably greater importance—they helped transform the center-console boat from a practical and utilitarian fishing platform, into a lifestyle.

Today’s center consoles are a far cry from those early boats. Modern coring materials and better knowledge of fiberglass encapsulation have eliminated rot for the most part and have also made the boats much lighter. Computers now design hulls and place fuel tanks for optimal weights and balances, and the invention of the T-top allowed owners to hang Isinglass curtains and electronics boxes overhead. Consoles became more sophisticated, with large surfaces for mounting electronics, toe recesses, footrests, tackle storage, and head compartments.

Remember when all of your electronics mounted on brackets on top of the console, and you unscrewed them and brought them in the house when not in use? Now most units get permanently flush-mounted, often in lockable spaces.

“Those early boats had zero storage beneath the deck,” said Owen Maxwell of Regulator Marine, “so your coolers, tackle boxes, buckets, everything sat on deck and slid all over the place while you were running.” Maxwell says cleverly designed storage spaces have been a huge innovation. “But the biggest change was probably the invention of the head compartment,” he added, “so now the ladies would get on the boat with us.”

“I think the most notable development is the closed transom,” said Joe Neber, President of Contender Boats. “First the bracket and then the integral bracket, raised livewell designs we have today. The closed transom has allowed us to build deeper vees, add larger motors, and build bigger boats that are ultimately more seaworthy, and therefore go farther offshore in search of fish.”

All center-console boats still share the one design feature that makes them unique and so eminently practical—a centered helm with clear walking spaces on either side. It’s a design that redefined the boating industry, and as refinements keep coming our way, CenterConsoleAngler.com will be here to tell you about them.