The 220 Select Brings Home the Prize

Sea Ray’s 2001 dealer meeting provided an excellent opportunity to compare old vs. new. When compared to the 210 Bowrider, the new 220 showed Sea Ray’s designers have been very busy paying a lot of attention to both the styling and utility of this new sportboat.

Large Swim Platform

For starters, the small, tongue-depressor type swim platform found on earlier models has been replaced by a full-beam integral fiberglass platform that’s a full 2’6” long. It makes a great staging area for skiers and wakeboarders, and in fact the 220 Select is available with an optional wakeboard tower to meet the growth of this sport. A 3-rung stainless steel swim ladder with plastic treads makes reboarding easy, and the non-skid is excellent both on the platform and all along the gunwales for safe boarding from the dock.

Soaking in the Rays

The big news on this boat is the design of the sunpad. Traditional bowriders have a full-beam aft bench and sunpad, which impedes access to the swim platform. In contrast, the 220 Select has a walkway on the portside that leads directly from cockpit to platform. There’s a small jump seat here to make up for the seating lost by shortening the bench, and of course you also lose some sunpad real estate in this design. But the 220’s pad can still handle two sunworshippers while making platform access easy.

Ride and Performance

In terms of performance, we initially thought the addition of a beefy Bravo III drive to a 22-footer was overkill, but it turned out to be an excellent drive choice. Hitched to a single 300-hp MerCruiser 350 Magnum, the twin, counter-rotating propellers of the Bravo III eliminated all steering torque and resulted in rail-straight tracking even with hands off the wheel. What this means is if you do lose your grip for a moment, the 220 Select will continue to maintain a constant heading (unlike some boats that pull hard to one side).

Finally, the relatively high gunwales give you a very secure feeling that you’re IN this boat (as opposed to riding atop of it) and that’s important since she tops out at better than 52 miles an hour. With seating for at least six passengers and a fast time-to-plane of just 4.2 seconds, the new 220 Select is an excellent choice in an all-around family sportboat.

• Top speed for the Sea Ray 220 Select (2005-) is 50.3 mph (81 kph), burning 19.3 gallons per hour (gph) or 73.05 liters per hour (lph).


• Best cruise for the Sea Ray 220 Select (2005-) is 28.0 mph (45.1 kph), and the boat gets 3.54 miles per gallon (mpg) or 1.51 kilometers per liter (kpl), giving the boat a cruising range of 150 miles (241.4 kilometers).


• Tested power is 1 x 300-hp MerCruiser 350 MAG MPI.