Pickthall - Motorboating

Contents

This edition first published 2009

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Getting started

I was first drawn to powerboating as a child through a passion for fishing. Rather than wait for the fish to come my way, I soon learned that it was far more profitable to chase after them. I rigged up a small outboard on the back of the family dinghy and spent endless hours trawling for mackerel or sitting anchored off the beach with worm-baited lines pulling up Dover sole.

From there it was a short enthusiastic jump first to waterskiing, then fast cruising from port to port. It is an adventurous, exciting, and fun sport that can appeal to all the family.

A fast seaworthy power cruiser can carry you a long way in a day: across the English Channel to taste the delights of French cuisine, run across the Gulf Stream from Miami or Fort Lauderdale to spend the day on a deserted beach in the Bahamas, or simply to get out to where the fish are running.

The latest electronic nav aids take the guess and stress out of navigation, and the ability to cruise at 20knots + becomes a major safety factor, giving you the ability to outrun bad weather.

Nowadays, many people discover the delights of getting afloat later in life, bypass the small fishing dinghy inauguration altogether and are introduced through friends or experiences on holiday, straight to high powered sports fishing or power cruisers.

Thats fine, but buying a powerboat is often one of the biggest expenditures many of us will make, so it is prudent to know what you are doing before going afloat, or at least to have an experienced hand onboard to show you the ropes. Better still, enrol on an introductory sailing course like those organized by the UKSA to learn not just the rudiments of getting a boat to go where you want it to, but how to dock, communicate and navigate safely. These are all essential skills, and your choice of boat will be all the more informed once you are competent and confident enough, to take her out for the day or weekend.

This powerboat manual takes you through a step-by-step guide based on the UKSAs teaching programme and is designed to provide readers with a thorough grounding to enable you to manoeuvre, plan and make a passage safely.

Powerboating is a great recreation, not just for moving from A to B but opening opportunities to scuba diving, fishing, waterskiing and socialising. Whether your choice is an Orkney sports fishing boat, a Ribtec rigid bottom inflatable (RIB) or a power cruiser like the Tony Castro-designed Galleon 44 flybridge cruiser all featured in this book, everyone has the opportunity to enjoy being afloat.

You will love it!

Barry Pickthall

Basic principles

Powerboat types

What type of powerboat should I buy? The first-time buyer is confronted with bewildering choice of shapes and sizes, some of them very specialised and intended for varying conditions and uses. If your interest is fishing on rivers or lakes, then a small flat-bottomed boat that is light, stable and easy to transport could well be the boat for you.

Fishing offshore requires a more rugged design with greater freeboard and a hull shape that will slice through the seas rather than bounce uncomfortably over them.

Should cruising be your prime criteria, then size and number of berths may be your first consideration, but running costs and where to keep her should be a close second.

Hull shapes

Hull forms can be divided into two broad categories: displacement and planing.

Planing hull in slow displacement mode.

Planing hulls obtain their dynamic lift from a combination of hull shape and the speed at which they move through the water. As speed increases, the hydrodynamic forces lift the hull up on top of the water, reducing drag and wave-making resistance to allow relatively high planing speeds. The transition point between displacement and planing is known as hump speed. This is where the hull generates enough lift to rise up on top of the water and accelerates forward just as if a turbo has kicked in when driving a car.

Same hull in full planing mode.

Displacement hulls

Traditional, non-planing types are known as displacement hulls. Working on Archimedes principle that a floating object displaces its own weight of water at rest as well as at speed, these traditional hull shapes are continuing to push aside their own weight of water, setting up a wave at the bow and stern.