Cigarette Yachts for Sale

Cigarette dates to 1969 and to Don Aronow, who built the boats on 188th Street in North Miami, won offshore races with them and turned the name into shorthand for speed. Aronow was assassinated on that same street in 1987, and the company passed through a run of owners before Skip Braver bought it in 2002 and held it for twenty years. In May 2021 he sold to Lionheart Capital and the Miami entrepreneur John H. Ruiz. The boats are still built at Opa-locka, Florida, and the line has moved a long way from the pure race boat: the current range runs from 38 to 59 feet and is mostly high performance center consoles, with the Top Gun, the 42X and the 515 carrying the old shape forward.

Two quite different markets sit under this one name. A 1980s or 1990s Cigarette is a collector boat bought for the hull and the badge, and it needs everything a thirty year old go fast boat needs: transom, stringers, engine beds, fuel tanks, a likely repower and rigging nobody has opened in years. A recent one is a current production boat with a carbon fiber vacuum bagged hull and deck and Mercury Racing power up to 3,100 horsepower, so the questions shift to hours, drive service intervals and whether anyone actually ran it at the numbers it was sold on. On either boat the engines carry most of the value, which makes the Mercury Racing service file the most useful document in the folder, and a sea trial at full throttle, with someone who knows these drives, worth more than any amount of paint.