| my guess is mayabe mid 70's. anyway i knew 2 guys who owned them.
there a dam nice boat, well made, and very seaworthy. one of them
had a 351 in it, and it went like hell. the reason i can say they
are well made, one of them wound up on the rocks, sat for a day
till we could get out to get it, we towed it off the rocks,
for what it had gone thru, we could still tow it 14 miles.
if its for sale, and your interested, as long as it aint' been
crashed buy it....
JIm.
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| HiLiner boats ORIGINALLY were built in Massachusetts...of wood. They
had two models, roughly 16' and 19'. They went out of business in the
early 60s.
In the mid-late 60s, someone commissioned Ray Hunt to design a high
performance offshore racing boat in the 21' range. They bought the
rights to the "HiLiner" name and started manufacturing the 21' 6"
deep-V boats in Manchester, N.H. in the late 60s. The boat was very
much a knock-off of the very popular 20' Bertram. It was available in
three models, a standard runabout, a raised-deck cuddy cabin (called
the "Gypsy" model and a racy smaller cockpit model designed to compete
directly with Bertram's 20' "Baron" model.
All HiLiners had Holman and Moody modified Ford engines in three
flavors...289, 302 and 351. All were sterndrives with the exception
of ONE BOAT (which I nearly bought) which was a prototype V-drive
inboard (if anyone knows the location of this boat, I'd love to know).
In the early 1970s, there was an enormous fire at the HiLiner plant
(corner of Canal and Granite Streets - site of the old Dobles Chevrolet
dealership) in which lives were lost. The company was unable to
restart and they were bought by the owner of Nashua Ford. He moved
production facilities to Grenier Field (Manchester Airport) and they
started cranking the boats out in volume. Where they had ALL been
plain white, they now started with colored hulls. Where the engines
had all been Homan and Moody high performance types, they started
putting in plain OMC and MerCruiser sterndrives. Where the boat had
always been called the "HiLiner 21", they began calling it the "HiLiner
222". In about 1973, they were stocked to the roof with boats. They
went under and that was the end of HiLiner.
In my opinion, HiLiner is one of the best designs that has ever been
put out in the 20-23 foot range. It has smooth lines, it is VERY soft
riding in rough water and it is very fast with proper power. I have
followed the company's progress from 1968 until today and I will
probably end up owning (and restoring) one some day...once my existing
"fleet" gets down below five.
It's a boat worth investing in.
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| Interesting. If I see the HiLiner I've been seeing all summer again I'll ask the
owner about it. I've seen it at the town landing where my boat is moored. The
reason I took note of it was that it was stern drive when other boats of it's
type seem to be outboard in that area. By type I mean 19' - 22' center console
fishing type boats. It has a white hull, but I seem to remember a red band
around the upper part of the side. I looked at the name, HiLiner, but didn't
mean a thing to me.
john
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