Regal's 2000: A Compact, Easy to Trailer Bowrider
Regal’s 2000 bowrider, with its wide 8-foot six-inch beam, offers plenty of room in a compact, easy to trailer package. Regal also incorporated lots of storage, something often lacking on smallish boats, and built the 2000 on their award-winning FasTrac hull for increased performance and fuel economy.
While its wide beam is most noticeable aft, it pays off forward as well, with a substantial bow seating area. Large upholstered seat backs in front of the windshield and another in the bow, plus side bolsters provide 360-degree padded comfort, with port and starboard handrails and drink holders for convenience. Regal hinges the bottom seat cushions along their aft edge and adds pneumatic supports to keep them open, allowing easy access to long, deep storage compartments beneath the seats. These compartments continue aft beneath the windshield to store long objects, and the seat backs just ahead of the windshield also lift, giving additional access for bulkier items.
The wide beam also enables Regal to widen the windshield walkthrough without encroaching on seating, and this also allows a wide hatch in the walkthrough deck to access the ski locker beneath.
Immediately behind the windshield the 2000’s beam really pays off. There is plenty of room at the helm, with comfortable seats with ample legroom and space outboard of the seats for drink holders and handrails, plus lots of room between the seats to walk through. Regal’s attention to detail, quality hardware, and upscale features are noticeable here too. For example, a complete array of engine instruments plus speedometer, digital depth, and temperature displays. I particularly appreciate the standard-equipment stereo remote, placed right in the center of the tilt steering wheel. The stereo is mounted in the glove box behind the windshield on the port side, with an option for an additional remote at the swim platform. Our test boat was equipped with an optional Sirius satellite radio, and there is also an optional iPod dock.
A little farther aft, the boat’s beam allows a starboard side transom walkthrough as well as L-shaped cockpit seating. The port side seat lifts, hinged at the back with a pneumatic stay, to access a 25-quart Igloo cooler. Particularly on a boat this size, a removable cooler can be much handier than having one built in, as it can be taken ashore. There is also dedicated storage for a trash receptacle, beneath the sun pad on the port side, just aft of the cooler. The aft part of the cockpit seat as well as the center section of the sun pad both sit atop the engine hatch, with more storage under this hatch and pneumatic lifts to allow the engine hatch to be lifted easily and held up safely. Because of the transom walkthrough, the sun pad is only a bit over five feet long, not quite long enough to allow an adult to lay completely flat. Regal offers an optional filler cushion, though this creates more seating, not a larger sun pad.
Back on the swim platform, the stainless steel telescoping boarding ladder is concealed beneath a hatch with additional room here to store a few dock lines, made possible because the hull extends all the way to the back edge of the swim platform. In the center of the boat, however, the hull is recessed beneath the swim platform for the stern drive. This isolates people in the water from the outdrive as much as possible. This is a great safety feature, particularly for towed watersports. The biggest feature of the hull, however, is Regal’s patented FasTrac design, which incorporates a step in the bottom of the hull running diagonally from the waterline to the keel around the middle of the boat. This step draws air from above the water down beneath the hull, allowing the boat to ride on a pocket of air and thereby reducing drag. This allows the 2000 to perform admirably with just a 6-cylinder, 4.3 liter, 225-horsepower engine. Our test boat topped 48 miles-per-hour and traveled more than 4.3 miles-per-gallon at cruise. Of course 8-cylinder engines are available as well, from 220 to 300 horsepower, and the FasTrac hull harnesses this power well, with great control in tight turns and effortless straight tracking.
While its wide beam offers more room for its length, and the FasTrac hull provides bigger performance for its horsepower, Regal’s 2000 bowrider offers one other thing a bit harder to measure...huge fun.
