The Wellcraft was the largest boat in our five-vessel roundup. With its 12’5” beam, it has the biggest cockpit, although not the best equipped.

If you don’t enjoy fiddling and diddling with your boat—washing it, waxing it, tightening things up in the engine room, adding gizmos to the helm, and so on—then the vessel may simply be a tool, a means to an end.

For some, that end is sipping a margarita in the cockpit while anchored in a tranquil tropical gunkhole. But for others—many others who read this publication—the boat carries on a much more utilitarian mission. To fish.

If you’re going offshore, say 40 or 50 miles, that boat has got to have some size to it—not only in the cockpit, but it must have sufficient quarters where the crew can eat, sleep, drink,…