Hatteras Yachts

The Boat That Started the Fiberglass Era

Hatteras traces back to 1959, when Willis Slane, a High Point, North Carolina businessman and avid angler, set out to build a fishing boat strong enough to survive the water off Cape Hatteras. He hired a young naval architect, Jack Hargrave, who was then designing for Rybovich and would later found his own yard, Hargrave Yachts. Their 41-foot Knit Wits launched on 22 March 1960 as the first fiberglass boat over 40 feet ever built, and the largest fiberglass pleasure boat made in North America at the time.

The material choice was the real breakthrough. Wooden sportfishing boats of the era flexed, leaked and rotted under the pounding of offshore work, and fiberglass did neither, so Knit Wits proved a hull could be built at a size nobody had tried before. The company set up its plant in New Bern, North Carolina, where Hatteras yachts have been built ever since, and the name became shorthand for a whole category of American offshore sportfishing boat: the Carolina-style convertible.

Three Owners Since 2001

Hatteras grew through the 1960s to 1990s into the dominant name in large American sportfishing yachts, then changed hands repeatedly as the marine industry consolidated. Brunswick Corporation, the world's largest recreational marine group, owned Hatteras from 2001 to 2013. Brunswick sold Hatteras and its CABO sportfish brand to Versa Capital Management, a Philadelphia private equity firm, in August 2013, and the workforce fell over that period from a peak of roughly 1,500 employees to about 275.

White River Marine Group, the boatbuilding arm of Bass Pro Shops, bought Hatteras from Versa Capital in May 2021, pledging to keep the New Bern yard making sportfish boats while moving MAKO and Ranger Saltwater production into the same facility. The new ownership has invested in tooling for an entirely new sportfish generation, though it also laid off about 80 New Bern workers in November 2023 during that transition, a reminder that the yard now operates at a smaller scale than during its Brunswick-era peak.

The GT Series Restated What a Hatteras Could Do

In 2011 Hatteras, under then-president Jim Meyer, launched the GT Series: the GT54, GT60, GT63 and GT70, built on resin-infused, variable-deadrise hulls engineered specifically to run faster than the convertibles that came before them while keeping the brand's known rough-water manners. The GT63 became the volume model of the family, delivered from 2012 through 2018 before Hatteras replaced it with the GT65 Carolina, a design that added computational-fluid-dynamics hull work and an infused hull-and-stringer structure built as a single part.

The GT program mattered beyond its own sales figures: it reset what buyers expected a Hatteras to do, chasing 40-knot top speeds on twin Caterpillar diesels rather than the more sedate performance of earlier Hatteras convertibles. It also gave the brand a genuine, checkable modern record, most visibly in 2018 when a GT63 named Post One crossed the Atlantic twice in a single year under her own power, a feat few production sportfishing boats anywhere have matched.

Where the Brand Stands Today

Under White River Marine Group, Hatteras builds a smaller, more focused lineup than in its Brunswick-era heyday: the 48 and 77 sportfish models plus what the yard now calls its Legacy GT Series, sold and serviced through the same national dealer network of MarineMax, Galati Yacht Sales, HMY Yachts and others that has represented Hatteras for decades. New Bern remains the only place a Hatteras is built.

For a buyer today the calculation is straightforward: an older Hatteras convertible like the GT63 offers a real, well-documented sea-going record and a deep base of comparable hulls on the brokerage market, but it also means buying long-term support from a company on its third corporate owner since 2001. That is not a reason to avoid the brand, which is still a benchmark name in American sportfishing yachts, but it is a genuine factor to weigh against a newer design from a competitor with more continuous ownership.