BOAT REVIEW
STABILITY AND
By Erwin Bursik
S
UPERCAT Marine’s Dennis Schultz, who I have known since the earliest days of SKIBOAT magazine, first introduced me to his range of ski-boats when I tested his Supercat 620 off Port Alfred on the banks of the Kowie River. His innovative ideas captured my attention then, but it really boggled my mind when he asked me to do a review on the Supercat 38 Sport, an 11.6m displacement bitech hull that I was told could do 20 knots powered by twin 50hp motors. He also asked me to test the Sliver 29 that followed. My introduction to the craft in the
20 • SKI-BOAT January/February 2022
marina was great, but as I took the helm and pointed her hull into the big waves rounding the western breakwater of the Kowie River, my faith in Dennis and the two 50hp outboards powering Stiletto took a huge nose dive. All I remember to this day is Dennis standing next to me at the helm and reiterating that I must keep her straight bow-on to the sea, and saying, “Don’t touch the throttles!” We exited perfectly with oncoming waves seeming to rush through the craft’s tunnel without any major upward lifting of the bow. Now it’s 20 years later, and during
the intervening years I saw a sportfishing model of the 38 Sport, Castle Lager, very effectively fishing the waters off the north Kenya coast from Watamu. The first 29ft Supercat, Sliver 29, was bought into production in early 2007, and I reviewed her in the November/December 2007 issue of SKIBOAT. That craft was powered by twin 40hp 4-stroke outboards that maxed out at 21 knots at sea. With Dennis’s two sons, Neil and Clinton, having taken over the helm of Supercat Marine under the advisory eye of the old seadog, Dennis, a number of changes and innovations have been
