NorthCoast 415HT Boat Review

NorthCoast 415HT

“I grew up as a farmer,” Jose “Joe” Daponte, the Azorean-born President and Owner of C&C Marine (builder of NorthCoast Boats), tells me as we begin trolling daisy chains for bluefin tuna. It’s just before daybreak and we’re aboard hull number one of his NorthCoast 415HT, somewhere south of Block Island. “Our little town was away from the water, but it was high. So every time I was on the farm, I’d look at the ocean and I’d see those boats going by. For some reason, it gave me some, you know, feeling about it. So when I came to this country, I said, I gotta try a little something.”

And that he did. The boating market moves in mysterious ways, and when Daponte first stepped off the proverbial boat from the Azores and into the brave and relatively new world of boatbuilding in Bristol, Rhode Island just over half a century ago, he couldn’t have imagined he’d be plonking quad 300-hp Yamahas on the transoms of 41-footers.

Daponte cut his teeth making the rounds through several boatyards—including C.E. Ryder in the 1970s and Albin Marine in the 1980s (whose hulls C&C Marine also manufactured for a time)—before purchasing the NorthCoast Boats brand name and hull molds in 2000, just after a time when they’d been the behind-the-scenes builder for center console pioneer Dick Lema. The investment came with two turnkey molds for 18- and 19-foot skiffs, which the new owners took out on the road to showcase under the Lema moniker. But realizing that the name wasn’t ringing bells on the boat-show circuit outside of the northeast, Daponte went back to the name NorthCoast. The brand had recently floundered, but he hoped its name and reputation could lead to a resurrection. He continued production of the two turnkey molds and also went on to design his very first: the 235, a 23-footer that is now NorthCoast’s bread-and-butter model.

Slowly but surely the boats grew, and now with the help of his two sons Cesar and Craig, Daponte splashed NorthCoast’s first 40-foot class model this spring—the 415HT.

With a full boat and seven sets of hands onboard, the 415 proved plenty fishable. We comfortably ran a six-line daisy-chain spread for most of the day. She was also capable, offering a ride not unlike a picnic boat of her size at cruising speed, but also with the athletic legs of a sportier offshore center console thanks to her quad Yamaha 300s.

Daponte and Co.—among whom he counts his sons and wife, Rosa, as employees—have tested the waters with smaller cabin cruisers—a 235, 255, 285 and 315—so they’re no strangers to the basic design they implemented for the 415HT, but being a 10-foot jump for a center-console company at heart, it is something else entirely. This is a Down East fishing boat but with softened, picnic-boat edges. Think of it as a more economical, family-friendly addition to the current 40-foot-class of outboard sportfishing boats on the market. Where others offer more open layouts and less cabin space, the 415HT is enclosed, air-conditioned and sleeps six (if you use the convertible galley settee).

A few elements on hull number one could use some tweaking, but that’s to be expected on any first build. The mezzanine bench in the cockpit is nicely positioned for watching the spread, but it would be a lot more functional if the folding window of the rear enclosure were retractable instead of a swing-out; when open, it’s a low-hanging hazard that renders a third of the bench unusable. The galley is well positioned and designed for quick and easy use, but upgraded appliances would go a long way, as would a more solid countertop—it was starting to warp and lose caulking.

These are the sorts of growing pains that get addressed on hull number two, and we can almost invariably associate them with many, if not all brands breaking into bigger models. NorthCoast is matching market demands as interest rates hover on the high side and cash buyers continue to spend big, which is undeniably directing builders toward large outboard cruisers like the 415HT: a boat twice as fast as its comparably-sized inboard-diesel forebears. Cruising at 31 knots and burning about 40 gph, this boat is priced at $1.08 million or about two-thirds the cost of many similarly-powered alternatives of the same size, and that’s nothing to turn your nose at.

The market is, after all, what brought DaPonte and his sons to the conclusion that they wanted to scale up. That, and after so many decades on small fishing skiffs, the spine appreciates a softer ride out to the tuna grounds. And a smooth ride it was. After a 3 a.m. roll call, we hit 48 knots at times with a crew of seven—just one knot under boat’s purported top speed when empty—on a 40-mile run across a flat ocean in the dark of night. This was Joe’s first bluefin run in the boat and his sons decided that it was high time the old man put some blood on the deck.

The Yamahas purred and trolling and jigging gear was at the ready in the rocket launcher. Lighting the way as we cast off was a pair of 19-inch Raymarine Axiom 2XL MFDs. One bore your standard chartplotter, while the other showed AR200 Stabilization Augmented Reality, which is nothing new in the way of tech, mind you, but it’s a handy tool when running busy harbors at night, especially those smattered with unlit vessels, lobster pots and fish traps.

First light was just breaking as Joe’s son Craig (who’s also NorthCoast’s Production Manager), backed off the throttle and daisy-chain lines hit the water. While there wasn’t any swell to speak of, the offshore metropolis that makes up the tuna-fishing grounds south of Block Island was alight with boats and every bit as alive with boat wash. The Seakeeper 4—which comes standard—whirred to life and answered chop beautifully.

Within five minutes of setting our spread and well before the sun broke, we were hooked up. I landed a small bluefin tuna several minutes later—the first tuna aboard this new design—and everyone relaxed a bit. But not for long. Bluefin are notorious for growing peckish at first light and then lying low all day after that, and NorthCoast Director of Sales and Marketing Gregg Weatherby couldn’t have been more right to drag every one of our reluctant behinds up out of bed so early.

It was no more than 10 minutes after my fish hit the deck when another Penn International 50 started screaming. This time, Joe indulged, telling us it’d been more than 10 years since he’d caught a bluefin. He fell in love with fishing 50 years ago and builds boats largely for tuna fishing, and yet he hadn’t caught a bluefin—the iconic sportfish of his adopted home waters—in 10 years? It turns out that Mr. Daponte is a humble soul. Like me, he’s happy staying inshore and catching sea bass, fluke, striped bass, tautog and scup for the table and that variation lends itself well to a pescatarian diet. Sure, tuna is delectable—bluefin, especially. But by and large, he and I concede to one another in a private powwow along the rail that small bony fishes are our jam. Daponte’s sons? They’ve been bitten by the tuna bug and seem to prefer getting offshore. “They’re already talking about a bigger boat. Give me a little break here,” Daponte called out to Craig, who was manning the helm.

One more fish came over the rail—or rather, through the handy side door—and the bite went more or less dead as we tried our hand at jigging, marking fish after fish with their bacon-fat bellies glued to the sand bottom. But whatever the gamefish were doing by now was of no matter. The smile on the old man’s face as his first tuna in at least a decade hit the deck of the first hull of his biggest project to date had already been committed to memory. I don’t care how old you are; if you can’t derive sheer giddiness, or at least some sort of joy out of witnessing that kind of self satisfaction in someone who’s dedicated the better part of their life to their craft, what’s left for you within your earthly wares? Sometimes, if not most times, watching someone else’s feat, be it hauling in a fish or seeing a new boat to fruition is every bit as enjoyable as reeling in—or building—a big one yourself.

NorthCoast 415HT Specifications:

LOA: 46’ 1”
Beam: 12’ 11”
Draft: 3’ 5”
Displ.: 24,701 lb.
Fuel: 612 gal.
Water: 100 gal.
Power: 4/300-hp Yamaha
Base Price: $1.08 million

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/outboard/northcoast-415ht-boat-review