We spoke to three brokers who had listings for an Ocean Alexander 50 Pilothouse online. Here’s what they had to say about these proven cruising motoryachts.
Rudi Kobelt, Kingfisher Yacht Sales; [email protected]
“The Mark II has a more modern appearance than her predecessor, with sleeker lines and less of a trawler look. What I like about the boat is the wide pilothouse with side doors. Interior volume is great for a 50-footer, even for a liveaboard boater. The person who wants to do the Great Loop should have this boat on their list. You can cruise it like a trawler, and when the weather picks up, you can run it up to 15, 16 knots and get in. That’s one nice thing about the semi-displacement hulls on these boats. It’s a big volume boat. When you go in, the size of the interior is what gets me. I’ve run a lot of boats, and this reminds me of a 65-foot Hatteras—the older ones. When you walk into the saloon you have that big saloon area, and then you go through the wheelhouse and down the steps and then to the right you walk into the bow, and you have the master up there, with its own head and shower. And if you’re doing long trips at night you can sleep right there and go back and forth. It’s a nice layout, it’s a two-couple boat, with kids. OA builds a very good boat.”
Dan Wood, Crow’s Nest Yachts Seattle; www.crowsnestyachts.com
“These boats are pretty venerable boats that just keep coming back to the market and getting resold—they’re good merchandise. The pilothouse style for the Northwest is probably the biggest attraction. It’s nice to be able to sit in that pilothouse and look out over your kingdom if you will, and be warm and dry and have some windshield wipers. The boat has a great layout and I sold one recently to a knowledgeable boater and he’s going to live aboard. The layout has the master forward. And he’s got a daughter that lives with him, so she’s got her own stateroom and her own head so it just worked out great—he just loved it.”
Ray Prokorym, Ocean Alexander Yacht Sales; www.oceanalexander.com
“The DNA of Ocean Alexander, the genesis started in those boats, and they were always a large-volume boat. If you go on an OA 90 or the 85, it’s a big boat. Good shoulder room, good headroom, good passageways, good staterooms. The ergonomics of the boats have always been large. I call them proper motoryachts. Compared with what’s out there, especially some of the U.S. boats or planing-hull boats, they’re smaller cabins, smaller companionways, smaller sitting areas. Ours have always been known for volume, and you see that even on the old ones. There was less allegiance to a particular engine manufacturer back in the day. You had Lehmans in these boats, or Detroits—another Mark II has Cummins in it, so there you go. In manufacturing and through materials and supply-chain management, OA eventually got more invested with a single manufacturer. But before that, you saw a lot of customer preferences winding up in the engine room. The company was in its incubation period in its early years and didn’t have the legacy or long-term commitment with any particular supplier. So you’ve got to remember it’s an Asian builder trying to build for the U.S. market. So if the U.S. customer is adamant that this Lehman or this Cummins or this Detroit or this Caterpillar was the engine and they had to have it, they were more semi-custom back then, all the way into the engine room.”
