The 11 Best Personal Watercraft for Fun and Play on the High Seas
Personal watercraft may have started out as wet-and-wild toys for grown-ups (hey, that’s not a bad thing!), with the first “water scooters” appearing in Europe in the 1950s. The first official standup, the Kawasaki JS 400 Jet Ski, appeared 50 years ago and sold more than 200,000 units. More than a decade later, the first sit-down jet bikes hit the market, thanks to Bombardier Sea-Doo and Yamaha WaveRunner, and started a craze that lasted into the late 1990s, when over 200,000 units were sold each year. While annual unit sales have dropped to about half that, the modern fleet has grown increasingly diversified.
The standup personal watercraft is still available from Yamaha and Kawasaki, as well as a handful of custom builders, but sit-down models dominate the market. These range from barebone two-seaters to more luxurious three-seat models to customized fishing models to electric watercraft to hybrid personal watercraft/inflatables that are priced at half a million dollars.
Thrill-seekers will still find an abundance of craft to satisfy that need for speed, but so too will adventure and camping enthusiasts, hard-core anglers, electric-power enthusiasts, and family buyers.
Here are our favorites across 11 categories.
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