About Centurion Boats
Rick Lee has been building boats about as long as he can remember. He and his father built his first, an eight-footer with a 10-hp outboard, in 1959, when he was 9 years old. He went on to set a world record, win a national championship, and put himself through college racing speed boats. Lee graduated as a P.E. teacher, but someone told him he should follow what he loved to do. Naturally he found his way into the boat business. He started selling boats and after a couple of years went out on a limb and started a boat company. He started building high-performance jet boats, day cruisers, and race boats. In 1976 he acquired the trade name “Centurion” from a Salt Lake City company that had a heritage dating back to 1964. He grew the company to what Centurion is today by building high-performance watersport towboats. “Back when Centurion started, nobody knew what an inboard was west of Tennessee. They were ugly, so no one wanted to know what they were. I got interested in them because I discovered that PCM had sold 1,500 motors in '78 or '79,” explains Rick Lee. “I investigated how they could be selling so many engines and consequently discovered the significance of the tournament boat market.” In 1979, Centurion built a 2.5-acre factory in Merced, California, and turned the companies high-performance, high-tech boat building skills toward making ski boats. He built the first “Ski Centurion,” and it was the first significant direct-drive ski boat produced on the West Coast. This boat brought the high-performance styling of the California speedboats to the water ski market.
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