The owner of WMF Watercraft and Marine based in Cape Coral, Fla., Bill Forenski has ordered 20-plus Avalon tri-toon boats powered by twin Mercury Racing 500R outboard engines for his multi-brand, full-service dealership. Just a few years back, in fact, Miami-based TNT Custom Marine co-owner John Tomlinson—a multi-time offshore racing world-champion throttleman—and I had a ball running a WMF-supplied 27-footer with that power package at the Mercury Racing’s Grove Harbor demo event during the Miami International Boat Show. The 27-footer was stable at speed, rode well in 1- to 2-foot bay slop and was surprisingly nimble.
Of course, pontoons with such formidable power are not for everyone.
“The average guy who buys a pontoon like this is a 55- to 60-plus year-old who has owned a lot of performance boats,” said Forenski, who recently took delivery of a 27-foot, “BMW Ice Blue” tri-toon Avalon carbon model with a pair of 500Rs “He still wants to be able to run fast, but his wife is not interested in it. She just wants to be comfortable. So this gives him the best of both worlds. He can run 60 to 70 mph comfortably if he wants to, or take the boat to a beach and pull up on the sand. No matter your age, it’s easy to get on and off. And it has enough seating to take a group of friends to a restaurant for dinner.
“The truth is, it’s a boat that checks all the boxes,” he added. “I had it out on Easter Sunday with a group of performance boats, and at the docks everyone was coming over to look at it. I took out one gentlemen, an experienced performance-boat guy, and he was like, Wow, this thing is just fun.’”
Equipped with niceties including Simrad electronics and custom-painted cowlings for the outboards, the 27-footer is a demo boat for Forenski’s Cape Coral dealership. In February, he sold his original Delaware location.
“I wanted to focus exclusively on Southwest Florida,” he explained. “Right now, this is the fastest-growing performance-boating area in the world. There’s no other place like it. So it all made sense for us.”