Countless hours spent browsing the
internet, talking to brokers and trawling
Thames and South Coast marinas
resulted in me making a lot of good
friends and contacts but still no boat.
The closest I got was a Kral 700 Classic
for sale with Sunseeker Southampton
that looked like a mini Riva albeit at a
fraction of the price.
RETRO RESEARCH
In the end I decided that the cockpit
was too small to work as a family
dayboat but it did get me thinking
about other retro-inspired boats. The
Chris-Craft range ticked all of my boxes,
with its long heritage and a reputation
for building top quality performance
boats, but I never thought I’d find one
within my budget. It was then that I
stumbled across an advert for a 1995
Chris-Craft Concept 27 at Bates Wharf
Marine in Eastbourne that had recently
come down from an asking price of
£26,500 to just £16,500. True, it was a
little bit older than I had been hoping
for and it didn’t have the elegant retro-
inspired styling which the yard is best
known for but the deep-vee hull and a
pair of 260hp petrol V8s with straight
through exhausts sounded appealing,
and at that price I could afford to spend
some money sorting out the rest of it.
I drove down to take a look at it and
was smitten. The cockpit and covers
were both pretty tired and the graphics
looked dated but mechanically she was
close to perfect with just 280 hours on
the engines and freshly reconditioned
sterndrives. My years spent buying and
selling classic cars meant I could
instantly see the potential while a sea
trial and engineer’s report confirmed
the rest. I offered £11,000, which was
swiftly rejected, and eventually did a
deal at £12,500. Outlaw was mine but
now I had some sorting out to do.
When I mentioned my plans to
Bates Wharf, Claire Bates said she’d
be keen to help with the project so we
agreed to work on it together and
had the boat moved to the company’shead office at Chertsey Marina on the
Thames, where it would be easier to
keep an eye on things.
The first step was to get rid of the
90s exterior graphics in favour of a
more timeless appearance and add
some colour and style to the looks. I’d
had experience of vinyl wrapping cars
before and decided to use the same
company (www.vehicle wraps.co.uk) to
do my new boat too. Wrapping instead
of painting meant I could experiment
with colours and shapes before
committing to the final finish.
I’m a big fan of the blue, red and gold
theme which the current Chris-Craft
range uses and wanted the exterior to
follow the same idea, but choosing
where the styling lines went and what
colours to use on the internal cockpit
panels was more challenging. After a bit
of tweaking we settled on a thick blue
hull band with red and gold styling lines
that tapered towards the bow and a
thinner matching set on the foredeck.
We followed the champagne gold
theme through to the interior cockpit
panels but added a metallic silver
edging strip to frame them. We alsoMy years spent buying and selling classic cars
meant I instantly saw the potential while a sea
trial and engineer’s report confi rmed the rest
A new Chris-Craft
wheel and matching
walnut dashboard wrap
smarten up the helmVinyl wrapping the
hull in Chris-Craft’s
traditional red, blue and
gold colour schemeBefore: the tired cockpit
with no walk-through and
an abundance of plain GRP
and plastic details on show