I owned a 2006 1850 Crestliner Fishhawk with a factory pre-rigged 150HP Suzuki 4-stroke from brand new in May of '06 until last Saturday 6/20/15. Late last summer (Mid-August) I noticed a couple of cracks in the welds along the transom. That was the last time I had it in the water. Late Nov comes along, time to put the boat in storage, but, let's get those cracks fixed 1st. I knew a guy @ the local dealership and he gave me the phone number for Crestliner customer service. I called them up and they wanted NOTHING to do with me direct, they only wanted to deal with a dealer. The local dealer (Ray's, Moorhead MN) are good folks, but, I bought from a dealer that's no longer in business and I don't think Ray's should have to deal with this, they didn't make any $$ on it and I'm sure have better things to do than worry about a boat they didn't sell. Ray's removed my motor and hauled it down to New York Mills for me at no charge. So far so good. Boat sits in NYM from Dec until mid-March, which is fine, I wasn't using it and they weren't charging for storage. This is the only winter my boat's ever been outside. I've stored it indoors since I bought it. Anyway, the cracked welds get fixed under warrantee no questions asked and on the approximate timeline. I'm only ~85mi from the factory so when it was finished I picked it up and pulled it to the dealer to have the motor re-hung, and that's when the real trouble started.
Local dealer goes to hang the motor on a week later and calls me, "We can't hang the motor or, your transom wood is rotten and we're crushing the hull when we tighten the mounting bolts." Well, that's inconvenient, but, I figure it's just 1 more phone call and surely Crestliner would be interested in having my boat fixed properly the 2nd time, and hopefully more quickly than 3mo. Nope, Crestliner doesn't warrantee wood. Now, as I said, the boat is stored indoors all the time except for the days I fish. I take the tarp off when in the garage and often run a fan to get things dried out. Surely someone at Crestliner will see that there are no soft spots in my entire boat floor and realize that I either got a bad piece of wood, or some other unforeseen issue caused the rot. NOPE!!
Without seeing my boat again they told me, "Your motor wasn't pre-rigged and your dealer didn't seal up the holes well enough." Was the 1st story I got. But that was incorrect, as my boat is a Pre-Brunswick model and it indeed was factory pre-rigged, I know because I filled out the order form myself. So I pointed that out and if they believed the un-sealed holes was the problem, it was their doing. Next story was, "Well, I can see that your motor's been moved, whomever moved it didn't seal it back up and that's what caused the leak that in turn caused the rot." That was also incorrect. I had my boat back to Crestliner in '07 or '08 (don't recall which) to have the hull rockered due to too much "hook" in the hull. So again, if the mounting bolt holes weren't sealed, that should be Crestliner's responsibility. Then communication stopped for 2wks. So, I started calling, and calling, and calling, and callling................During the 1st 6 weeks of trying to figure out what caused the rot and should it be warrantee or not, there were only 2 times that my calls were returned and information conveyed when Crestliner said they would. Once was the 1st time the interim manager of customer service called me to say he was looking into things, and the 2nd was a conference call with the President of Crestliner. Other than those 2 calls, I had to HOUND them for information.
So, they schedule to have my boat returned to NYM to have the engineers and the President look at it to determine the cause of the rot. I shuffle my schedule so that I can be there on that day. But, Crestliner, again failed to communicate and the dealer didn't have my boat ready to travel. So another week goes by (it's up to 7 weeks now) until my boat gets down to NYM and the next week I cannot be down there when they "inspect it". I finally got a call back from the interim manager of Customer Service and he tells me that due to the age of my boat they don't see any reason to warantee my boat but due to my persistence they'd "only" charge me $2,000. That's the decision that's come down from the President and that's my only option.
So to re-cap, a boat that's been used for 8 seasons, stored indoors all but the 30-40 days/summer I fish with it, has no soft spots in the floor and no other damage or modifications somehow had a transom rot problem and Crestliner wouldn't stand behind it.
I paid it and promptly sold it. The buyer knows the whole story and has a copy of the receipt.
