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I found this article recently about a man who restored one of the 1986 Miami Vice edition Scarabs and wanted to share it. Enjoy! Link to Article

About eight years ago I had just been made redundant as a yacht broker due to the recession and was trying my damnedest to build a career as a freelance marine journalist writing for boat magazines in the UK, with limited success it has to be said. In 2011, having penned a few articles for a then big UK boat magazine called Motor Boats Monthly, a friend (who knew I was a massive Vice fan) told me that the original Miami Vice Wellcraft Scarab (the boat Sonny used from Season Two onwards) had been fully restored and was up for sale. I checked out the web site and then emailed the editor of MBM saying we should do an article. He agreed, and asked me to speak to the owner, get some info and a few photos sent over and write something up. I contacted the owner, a lovely guy called Jim who had the boat in Ohio who said 'great, come out and have a go on it'. I spoke to the editor and said 'you got to let me go out and do this'. He said he'd love to, but there was no budget for flights and hotels, sorry. Desperate for the chance to see and experience the boat I told him that if he covered the expenses I'd do the article for him for free. No dice. So then I said, what's the most he could pay me for the article? He told me, I worked out the cost of flights etc and it didn't cover them. But it wasn't far enough off to stop me. I spoke to Jim, booked the flights and went (it was only the second flight I'd taken in my life at that point!) The result was the trip of a lifetime. Jim and his friends Mark and Kyle that joined us and helped were fantastic company. I was there for three days and they really looked after me, we all had a great time. I bought a new Nikon SLR before I left (I knew nothing about photography, just stuck it on 'auto' and hoped for the best) and borrowed a video camera. The weather was amazing and the boat was unbelievable! It looked like new but was authentically restored so it looked exactly as it did in Season Two (there were other Scarabs in later series - if you look closely you'll notice that colours and spec change slightly as the seasons progress - the radar arch changes from white to silver and spolights appear on it later on for example). I edited the video and put it on YouTube at the time. I wasn't great at video editing and the music I used (such as Crocketts Theme) caused the soundtrack to be silenced due to copyright violation. So anyway, I have re-edited it as best I can (unfortunately the original footage was lost, so I had to edit the edited video) and have put it on my AQUAHOLIC YouTube site. You'll find it here (as well as some video of my current boat 'Smuggler's Blues 2', my previous boat 'Smuggler's Blues' and the boat before that from a while ago, 'Mi Vice II' - you may notice a theme to my boat names!) It was the trip of a lifetime for me for lots of reasons. As a massive Vice fan and boat enthusiast, driving the original Vice boat was like a Trekkie getting a ride on the USS Enterprise. I made lifelong friends, visited the USA for the first time, and it even kick started my career. I got a terrific five page feature out of it, and two weeks later I had a call from the editor, would I go back to America to do a new boat test for them, this time all expenses paid. I ended up Boat Test Editor of that magazine a couple of years later, in great part due to the Miami Vice boat trip giving me the opportunity to show them what I could do. If you'd like to see Crockett's boat in action, you can find the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCitH5iJ0s-YwbuAg3MIo4Aw/videos Incidentally - Part 5 is just a series of still photographs, but amongst them are shots of the boat's interior, something you never see on the show. I hope you enjoy the videos, they bring back some amazing memories for me every time I watch them.