MTI's New 390X Sparkles In Key West

As the speedonthewater.com team has done the past few years, during its annual visit to Key West, Fla., for the Florida Powerboat Club Key West Poker Run and the Key West World Championships, which is being organized for the first time by Race World Offshore, a Saturday morning photo shoot was scheduled for earlier today. And, similar to a shoot on the same day two years ago, the weather wasn’t the greatest. Thanks to some patient people—the boat owners, builders and dealers—it went off smoothly, albeit a little later than expected.

Tom Hall, the proud new owner of MTI’s first 390X catamaran, took the helm of the 39-foot catamaran powered by Mercury Racing 450R engines for a photo shoot in Key West on Saturday. Photo by Pete Boden/Shoot 2 Thrill Pix (click to enlarge).

Always one of the biggest rewards of the photo shoot—besides getting the boats captured for our annual Year In Review print edition, which will go on sale next week—is getting to shoot some of the latest and great performance boats, and often the proud new owners driving the incredible machines.

Such was the case with the spanking new MTI 390X catamaran powered by twin Mercury Racing 450R engines—the same boat the Wentzville, Mo., company unveiled on Tuesday night at Haulover Marine Center in North Miami (read the story) and also sold that night to a customer with a MTI 340X.

Yes MTI sold the boat that night. One customer—New York’s Tom Hall—made an offer Randy Scism and his team couldn’t refuse, and now he’ll be taking the boat back with him after the Key West event.

After doing the 170-mile poker run from Miami to Key West on Wednesday, taking potential future customers for demo rides and displaying the boat during the party we co-host with our partners at OffshoreOnly.com on Thursday night, the MTI crew managed to rally for this morning’s photo shoot, which was delayed about 90 minutes due to some heavy rain and wind that stormed through Key West.

MTI’s Taylor Scism hopped in the 39-foot catamaran with Tom Hall and his son, Taylor, so she could help show them the ropes for the aerial photography session with Pete Boden and helicopter pilot Jarlath O’Brien of O’Brien Helicopters. As you can see from the photo above, the MTI, which was painted in-house, looked incredible in the turquoise water surrounding the southernmost city in the United States.

Of course we are not going to give away all of the best images from today, at least not right away, but we did want to share at least one, with many more to come on speedonthewater.com over the coming weeks, as well in our upcoming digital magazines and the collector’s edition 2019 Year In Review magazine that will start shipping in mid-January.

So for now the picture above of MTI’s new 39-footer is going to have to suffice. After all we have plenty of work to do and Boden has plenty of images to edit so we can share them later, well past the busy week in Key West.

MTI’s New 390X Sparkles In Key West

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