I drove through San Augustine about a month ago and pasted what looked to be the old Raycraft plant. They have a bunch of boat molds stacked up out there. It didn't look to be a very high tech operation when it was still open. I was wondering how long they have shut operations down and what was the reason. They seemed to have a good reputation around that area for building a tough boat.

A lot of boat builders took the big dump after '01.

Ray Craft had gotten away from what they did best, and started splashing (copying) successful hulls on the market and trying to build them cheaper. That's a sure way to find yourself out of business.

Raycraft did the same as Thunderbolt. Both would take a boat and simply copy it with a little mods to differ it enough from the original boat to avoid a copyright lawsuit.

Raycraft mainly copied Champions. While Thunderbolt copied the BassCat Pantera. Raycraft made a few changes while Thunderbolt built the EXACT same boat.

Raycrafts were fair to midland boats boats, but couldn't keep up with the new design trends in the industry. Most of their boats where on 10 year old boat designs. So anglers were having problems justfying spending money on a boat that looked 10 years old already.

As Pat mentioned, after 9-11, many of the smaller companies just couldn't support themselves when the market went flat for a few months.