I spied a unicorn last Saturday, https://www.speedonthewater.com/imag...tboard-haters/

One picture! But who is counting. LOL.

Padraig

I hold up a mirror, my friend, and it does not reflect a lot of stern-drive action. Do I miss it? Of course. Enough to fudge reality and pretend it's still a big part of the market. Nah.

Hope you are well.

I had mess with you....I just had to. We are well, still have the VR 1. Jason and Johnny Saris are doing an engine for it. You need to get back to Western NY.

Padraig

That Nor-Tech 420 Monte Carlo is one stunning boat. Giving honor to Carlo Riva, Cal Connell, and Cal Hobbs, by naming the model Monte Carlo

is great. Nowadays many of the 1980s Monte-Carlo Offshorer Superfast boats are running Yanmar diesels too, instead of their original gas engines.

Outnumbered 4 sure!

The true Unicorns are the buyers of stern drive optioned new boats. They just don't check that option on their builds anymore. It IS an option, but rarely checked.

People lament the death of manual transmissions in cars. Well.....if you don't buy them....guess what?

Trends come, trends go. Big Vee's were all the rave for years. Then cats came in hot and heavy. In the 80's there was a big surge in outboard power and it was trending hard. some messed around with performance diesels and turbines in the 90's and 00s. Early 2000's performance CC's "saved" the boating industry. Now it's 34ish cats with warrantiable Merc outboards. The industry ebbs and flows.

You know what's funny though that always makes me chuckle. You sit at the dock at Gilberts or anywhere else on a big poker run weekend, where all the outboard cats and CCs are tied off and a big, nasty, loud offshore boat rolls in loabing and obnoxious...Every head in the bar turns and you can hear people, "that thing is bad azz!" Even all the outboarders know cool when they see it.

The inboard boats will always be the star attraction at any event, nobody walks the docks to look at the outboard boats, especially when everyone fires up to leave. In motocross/supercross terms, the inboard boats are the factory teams, and the outboard boats are the privateers. Everybody is there to see the factory teams, and there's also a huge performance gap. As much as the outboard guys love to brag about how fast these new outboard boats are, they're still not even close to the fast inboard boats - and never will be. I've had outboards and inboards since the early 2000s, and what made the outboards so cool back then was that they were much more affordable than the inboard boats. I've still got an outboard and inboard cat, but I've only spent a fourth of the amount of money on my outboard cat. Now, the outboard boats cost almost the same as the inboard boats, yet the performance gap is still huge, making it hard for me to understand why guys are buying them like they are.

I have both for different purposes. I do like the added room with OB's, makes me wonder why when you look at that picture above of the OB cats they don't take advantage of that more like Mystic does and the new Nortech cat.

Lets face it a 1000+ HP BBC will never be as reliable as a new tech 500HP OB, but it does have half the power.