The Rise and Fall of Wellcraft: How the Miami Vice Boat Brand Nearly Died Twice

It is September nineteen eighty four, and the biggest television show in America has a boat. Miami Vice premieres on NBC and pulls more than ten million viewers an episode. It is created by Anthony Yerkovich and produced by Michael Mann, and it is built on a look, pastel suits, neon, turquoise water, a synthesizer soundtrack. By the second season, the boat that carries Sonny Crockett across Biscayne Bay is a Wellcraft Scarab 38 KV. It runs thirty seven feet, six inches. It carries twin four hundred forty horsepower Mercury inboards. It moves at close to eighty miles an hour. It is not a prop. It is a real offshore racing hull, and the country wants one. Orders climb twenty one percent in a single year. Wellcraft builds a version called the Miami Vice Edition and sells thirty three of them at one hundred thirty thousand dollars each. It gives Don Johnson his own copy, and he commutes to the set in it. This is the summit. A boat brand from Sarasota, Florida is now the most recognizable powerboat on the planet. And it is already dying. Within a generation this company files for bankruptcy, gets auctioned off in a courtroom, passes through four owners, and nearly vanishes a second time under a French conglomerate. The Miami Vice boat brand nearly dies twice. The man who now owns it bought it the same year the show premiered. His name is Irwin Jacobs. He is a financier from Minneapolis. He buys companies, not boats, and runs them from a desk. We come back to that. The company begins in nineteen fifty five. Bill Davis and Ed Crafton found Wellcraft Marine in Sarasota, Florida. They build wooden runabouts, fourteen and seventeen feet long, and small twelve foot skiffs. It is a modest shop on the gulf coast, one of dozens. Then the material changes. In the early nineteen sixties Wellcraft moves to molded fiberglass, a new technology at the time, and builds small cabin boats up to twenty three feet. Almost immediately the boats sell overseas, where buyers value the craftsmanship and the use of space.