When Catalina spilt the dealers in half (small and large) it put the C270 in an award marketing spot. It was not longer the largest boat offered that could be moved without a commercial hauler but the only boat offered that the sales staff even touched that could be moved by an owner. That's a game changer.
The salesman in the crew neck is going demonstrate how to raise and lower the mast but if he's wearing an ascot he'd better convince you the C28 is the boat for you. Add-in a nervous first time buyer and he's going to pick up on the fact the salesman is worried about this mast raising thing and either go C28 or back off to a C250 from a small boat dealer. To make things even worse Hunter remarketed its H260 lake rated boat as a mid range keel boat implying offshore capability and called it an H270. It sounded equivalent to a C270 on the surface but wasn't built or rated to go offshore. The H260 had some notable deck hull seam failures that translated to the H270 leading to a structural recall but that highlighted to the H270 owners this was only a lake boat. Concurrent to the recall Hunter ran an aggressive ad campaign about all Hunters have bolted through hull deck seams, which was only true after the recall, and even then open to interpretation. Hunter dropped the H270 marketing like a hot potato in favor of just calling it a H260 keel option. The H260 is of course a much less popular alternative to the C250. The offshore rated C270 is also a bit more costly to build being the first of the more structurally refined CXXX boats instead of and redo of an older CXX design. I don't know if that compresses dealer margins but I suspect it would. I think officially the C270 is still in production if one gets ordered. After all Catalina addressed every single C27 weakness highlighted by modification to "Juggernaut" which allowed the single handed circumnavigation of Catalina 27 by Patrick Childress when they started over with the C270 making it an exceptional boat. Every time Catalina ships a C270 the IC27A gets a check by hull number and the warranty card when it sells. Last time I looked there have been roughly 370 C270s built. Personally I think the Destinations section of the Mainsheet also plows the smaller boats under. You go to all the trouble of getting an exciting article written by a member and it doesn't show up on you section but off in Destinations. The whole point recognizing the sailing accomplishments of members is encouraging participation and catching the eye of perspective owners. Selling up is much easier if the C27/C270 articles are disassociated from the boat length. It's a simply oh yeah you can do that with a C28. Sacramento's Porsche dealer fell for that line and got a new C28 MKII after being drawn in by Wing Tip. After he had the C28 MKII brought in by cranes he found he couldn't go where the C270 went. Three weeks later the cranes were back. The same can be said for ALL Catalina Fleets where the smaller boats are constantly reminder storage is a little tighter, the waterline is a little shorter, and racing interferes with the cocktail hour. Hopefully the new small luxury SUV trend will translate to the sailing world. Maybe we should call a diesel aux sailboat hybrid powered and catch the wave. Phil Agur <http://www.catalina27.org/public_pages/profile270.htm> s/v Wing Tip C270 LE #184 MMSI 366901790 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of mkeller23173 Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 11:30 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [IC27A] Re: C270 Status? I heard that 2007 was the last year. I wasn't surprised. Having the 270 and 28 seems like a tad too much. Anyway, with the introduction in 06 I believe of the 309, it makes sense to me that they'd end the 270 and continue the industry wide push towards bigger boats. Mike --- In ic...@yahoogroups. <mailto:IC27A%40yahoogroups.com> com, "spkaldor" <spkal...@...> wrote: > > Does anyone know if the Catalina 270 is permanently out of production, > temporarly suspended, or what the future holds? > > I've heard that it was just suspended to move production to Florida, but that was a while ago and Catalina seems to be pushing the 28 pretty hard. > > Thanks! > > Sean >
