Release Yachts for Sale

Release Boatworks is a young yard doing an old job. Jim Turner laid its first hull in Miami in November 2011, and in 2017 he took on two partners and moved the company to a 13 acre plant at Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, laid out for boatbuilding. It builds mid size custom sportfishermen, quoted from 36 to 66 feet, with the 43 Gameboat, the 46 in express and walkaround form and the 55 flybridge as the boats you will actually see, and it names Rybovich, Merritt, Whiticar and Jim Smith as the tradition it is working in. Output is around a dozen hulls a year across Release and Gamefisherman, the legendary charter boat brand the yard bought when a phone call about making a few parts turned into buying the company.

On a custom sportfisherman the construction is the whole question, and Release answers it differently from the Carolina yards: these are not cold molded wood epoxy boats. The hulls are vacuum infused in a modified epoxy system with engineered laminate schedules and cored panels, done in house at Egg Harbor City. Second hand that is a real advantage, because there is no wood structure to keep dry and no specialist wood epoxy repair to organize: damage is conventional composite work that any competent yard can quote. What varies instead is the boat itself, since every one is built to an owner's brief, so tower, tackle, tankage, cockpit layout and machinery can differ completely between two boats of the same length. Volumes are small, so comparables are thin and a broker's knowledge of recent sales is worth more than any price guide. The best thing going for these boats is that the yard is young, still owned by the man who started it and still building: you can ask about a specific hull number and get an answer, which is not true of most sportfish names in this price bracket.