Striker Yachts for Sale

Herb Phillips came home from the war having watched a steel Liberty ship take punishment that would have finished a wooden boat, and in 1951 he lofted the lines of his first metal hull on the living room floor at Massapequa, Long Island, then rented a garage in Amityville to build it. He traded at first as the Sport Fishing Boats Company and filed the Striker trademark in January 1955. Striker built in steel first and moved to aluminum, and by 1959 Phillips had gone to Holland for the welding, where the first 35 foot aluminum Striker was finished in what is now the Heesen yard at Oss. Hakvoort built many of them as well, and the boats were imported into the United States, the trademark passing to Striker Boats, Inc. of Pompano Beach, Florida in 1961 and to Striker Aluminum Yachts, Inc. in 1969. Roughly 700 aluminum Strikers were launched from 33 to 70 feet, with 34, 44, 54, 58, 62 and 70 footers in the line, and the 44 coming off the floor about every six weeks in the good years. The last one was a 70 footer in 1995.

Nobody has honored a Striker warranty in thirty years and there is no factory, no parts counter and no owners' network worth the name, so buy one for the hull or not at all. That hull is the point: welded aluminum plate does not blister, does not delaminate and does not get tired, and a well kept Striker of forty years can be structurally better than a fiberglass boat half its age. What kills them is electrolysis, so the survey is an electrical survey as much as a hull survey. Have the surveyor check the bonding system, anode wastage, stray current in the slip, whether an isolation transformer is fitted, and above all corrosion in the places aluminum hides it: under wet deck core, behind bedded hardware, in bilges that have sat damp, and along welds. Paint on aluminum is a maintenance item forever. Anything you need fabricated will be fabricated rather than ordered, so line up a yard that welds aluminum properly before you buy, not after. And because every one of these was built in Europe and imported, confirm the duty status and the documentation history rather than assuming it was settled decades ago.