You have a Saturday, four friends who said yes, and a marina that will be three-deep at the fuel dock by ten. You want to be off it and running before the crowd builds — and you want to be back at the slip that evening without a crew, a captain, or a systems briefing before anyone can sit down.
That is the day the Sea Ray SLX 280 Outboard is built around. And unusually for a 31-foot sport boat, Sea Ray will tell you almost everything you want to know about it before you ever step aboard.
Who It's For
The SLX 280 Outboard suits the owner who runs a busy social calendar on the water and wants the boat to be the easy part of it. It is a day boat — Sea Ray publishes no berth count and makes no weekender claims — with a head compartment for the practical necessities and a cockpit organised around people rather than gear.
It is also, deliberately, a narrow boat. At 9'0" of beam on 31'5" of length overall, it is proportioned like a sport boat rather than a deck boat. That matters two ways. On the water it feels pointable and quick to answer the wheel instead of wide and flat. On land it fits into storage and haul-out arrangements that a ten-foot beam starts complicating.
If you want a broad, flat entertaining platform for a dozen people, look at a wider hull. If you want a 31-footer that still feels like a boat you drive, this is the shape.
Design & Layout
The bow is the SLX 280 Outboard's signature: a U-shaped forward seating area built for conversation rather than for two people staring at the back of the helm seat. Sea Ray's aim in the current SLX cockpit was more room and deeper seats, and the storage follows the same logic — a transom locker and a cockpit floor compartment take the gear out of the walkways instead of piling it on a sunpad.
The transom sunpad has a cooler built in underneath the seat, which is the sort of detail that decides whether people get up and move around all afternoon. The option list adds a drawer-style cockpit refrigerator and an end table with a wireless charging station.
Over the top, the optional next-generation Power Tower raises and lowers electrically and carries an extendable sunshade. Swivelling wakeboard racks are available on it, so a boat bought for entertaining can be pressed into watersports duty without a permanent structure hanging over the cockpit for the rest of the season.
At the helm, a standard Dual Digital Dash with 9-inch Simrad touchscreens — upgradeable to 12-inch — carries Mercury engine data, Active Trim control and monitoring, and CZone digital switching. A Fusion stereo is part of the standard fit.
Performance
Standard propulsion is twin Mercury 250 Verado outboards with Joystick Piloting: T-250 hp, fitted as the boat rather than offered as an upgrade. That last point is worth dwelling on. Joystick control on a twin-outboard 31-footer is what turns a cross-wind approach to a side-tie from an event into a non-event, and here you are not paying extra to find out whether you needed it.
Here is what Sea Ray publishes:
| Specification | Sea Ray's published figure |
|---|---|
| Length Overall | 31'5" |
| Beam | 9'0" |
| Dry Weight | 8,053 lb |
| Fuel Capacity | 135 gal |
| Water Capacity | 20 gal (requires Water System Bundle) |
| Holding Tank | 10 gal (requires Water System Bundle) |
| Draft, trim down | 35" |
| Draft, trim up | 22" |
| Deadrise | 21° |
| Standard Propulsion | Twin Mercury 250 Verado outboards with Joystick Piloting (T-250 hp) |
| Cruising Speed | 29-31 mph |
| Wide Open Throttle | 50-52 mph |
| Range at cruising speed | 180 mi |
| Range at WOT | 148 mi |
| Capacity | Yacht Certified |
Two of those rows deserve a second look. The 21-degree deadrise tells you more about how the boat will feel than the top speed does — it is enough vee to keep the ride civil when the afternoon sea breeze fills in, on a hull light enough at 8,053 pounds dry that 500 total horsepower is generous rather than merely adequate.
The other is the range. Sea Ray publishes 180 miles at cruise and 148 miles wide open. Very few builders in this class publish range at all, and the ones that do usually give you a single number without saying at what speed. Treat it as the builder's arithmetic rather than a guarantee, verify it against your own running on the sea trial, and understand that a hard day of towing and idling is a different animal from a delivery run. But you are starting from a published figure instead of somebody's estimate, and that is genuinely rare.
The 22-inch trim-up draft is the other number to keep in your head. It is what lets a 31-footer nose up to a sandbar with the engines tilted, and it is the everyday advantage of hanging the power off the transom.
Ownership
This is an owner-operated boat. No crew, no professional on retainer, and outboard power means the annual service list is short and the mechanic never has to reach past a stringer to do it.
There is one line in Sea Ray's own spec block that you should not skim: both the 20-gallon water capacity and the 10-gallon holding tank are marked "Requires Water System Bundle." The standard boat has no fresh-water system aboard. No rinse-down at the transom, and a head compartment without plumbing behind it. It is a bundle, not a redesign, and the option list also offers a Pump-Out Head and a VacuFlush Head System with holding tank if you want to go further. Decide at order time, because plumbing added later is the job nobody enjoys paying for twice.
The counterweight is coverage. The SLX 280 Outboard is an SLX Sport Boat, which puts it under Sea Ray's five-year SURPA5S+ bow-to-stern warranty plus a Limited Lifetime Structural Hull/Deck Warranty to the original owner — longer than most of this class carries.
Where to Start
Run it on the same day as a wider deck boat of similar length. The 9-foot beam is the decision you are actually making, and it is a feel you cannot read off a page. While you are out there, hold Sea Ray's 29-to-31 mph cruise for a real stretch, watch the fuel flow on the Simrad screen, and see how the published 180-mile range squares with the way you actually run a boat.
Talk it through with us: TS@MintedYachts.com, +1 (404) 805-9819, or the form on this page.