BOATING BASICS
Part 1: How the hull and chines affect your craft’s ride
By Rob Naysmith, Down South Marine
I
REMEMBER reading many decades ago, an article adorned with pictures and diagrams, mentioning chines, gunnels, strakes, dead-rise, transom angles, and the likes, and thinking to myself: “It’s fine knowing that these are parts of a boat, but technical jargon is for land skippers, not fishermen. If boat builders know to put these things on boats then we’re all fine.” During my lifetime I’ve been fortunate enough to have skippered many different makes of boats, along different parts of our coast, through the surf, in the massive Atlantic storm swells, in the most idyllic conditions and everything in between. Some boats I’ve loved and on some I’ve wished I’d taken along spare underpants. The one conclusion I’ve reached through all of that as a skipper is that the writer of the article was right — I
Even in the cross-sea approach the strakes of this monohull retain its lateral stability and throw the spray created down and aft.
26 • SKI-BOAT May/June 2020
did need to understand that technical jargon. Understanding what makes a boat ride and behave like it does goes a long way to helping determine the best boat for your application and how you can take full advantage of its design. So, to follow on while adding the many new developments I’ve witnessed since that article, I’ll try to explain the fundamentals of what the various boat parts do and how they inf luence a boat’s performance, what to look for and what to avoid. Now bear in mind that I’m no naval architect or boat design expert, nor am I a highly qualified engineer; I can only speak from experience and from witnessing firsthand the effects of the sea on the different aspects of hull design. This may take a while, so get comfortable while we talk boats …. HULL TYPES The most common disagreement you’ll hear amongst boaters is over which is the better hull type — a mono or a cat?
Then comes the stability issue — which is more stable at sea? Which has the better ride? Which is the easiest to handle? These are all basic but essential considerations. As more of a mediator, I am not going to stick my neck out and say which is better; I own both kinds, so it’s my prerogative to sit on the fence Let’s take a look at the histor y behind the two major recreational boat designs along our coast. Mono hulls were around long before cats appeared on our shores — not necessarily because they were better, but because they were tried, tested and best understood. When cats first appeared there was huge scepticism from traditional boaters, but eventually their advantages came to the fore, primarily along the east coast. In essence, the “V” of a boat’s hull determines its ride. The sharper the V, the better it handles rough conditions simply because it slices through the water more easily. However, the downside is that they tend to lean to one side
