I had an old 16' checkmate with a 225 Merc. Believe it or not my dad bought it for by brother and I when we were 17 and 20. We didn't know much about performance back then so we were unaware that the propeller we had was (intentionally) limiting our performance. It was still pretty fast though. We learned to drive the boat and then ripped the lower unit clear off with a rock just outside of Marathon. By this time we knew a little more about performance (ofcourse obviously we did not know how to drive) but we replaced the lower unit with a crescent and put a chopper on it. We had alot of fun on that boat !!

Hyper
 

My neighbor has an older Checkmate w/ 115 Merc OB. If you remember the old Bajas were called Cobras, this is the same type boat. About 17 or 18 ft. Asking price was $500.00. If interested I will look into more. I've never looked at it closely, the exterior looks OK from the street. Thats about all I can tell you now

Rick, could you get some pics?

You might want to check out the site WWW.Hotboat.net . They deal with a lot of the smaller fast lake and river boats. They also have complete listings and classifieds. Good luck with your search.