question for the board: lack of deck space??

Hello

I have been spending a lot of time looking at boat designs and for some reason cant seem to find any boats with ample deck space. In almost every boat if you have a center console there is very little room to walk around the center console and in almost every other design there is no deck space at the bow (most of the time because the space is used for a cabin/enclosure) and very little in the stern. So many boats are filled with cushions and storage areas etc that there is no place to walk/stand. Also I have noticed that flat bottom boats tend to have more space per foot of length but in a normal 25-30 foot v-bottom fishing boat there is only a few square feet of actual deck for at best one or two persons to actually stand!

Is there a design reason or other limitation that makes it difficult to have lots of clear deck space all the way around a boat, with plenty of beam, and just a small center console or enclosed pilot house?? is there such a boat? (so far the best I have found are the aerocat power cats)

 

I'm not sure what designs you're looking at, but these considerations are commonly addressed. the 25 - 30 foot range is a a huge area to select from. Meaning a 2,500 pound boat, to a possible several ton difference.

The easiest way to sort out the design selection process (which should be extensive) is to make lists of your desires and needs and slowly whittle this down to a second list of what you just can't live without. Somewhere in between will be a few designs that hit on most of the list items.

 

What is "ample deck space?" For fishing" Stand up rods?

Manufacturers of "tournament" style center consoles are pretty open, like a Contender 23 or 27

http://www.contenderfishingboats.com/boats.aspx?id=42

http://www.contenderfishingboats.com/boats.aspx?id=326

or a Sea Vee 29

http://www.seaveeboats.com/pdf/SeaVee290.pdf

or the Jupiter 29

http://www.jupitermarine.com/29t.aspx

No seating forward, no seating at all except for at the helm. Most of the center console manufacturers with a fishing heritage will have a "tournament" series which will be more open than their other models.

These boats will have wide gunwales, smaller consoles to allow better access down either side, no seats except for at the helm for plenty of room to "walk around" while fighting a fish. Many of the larger ones will have a "coffin box" forward of the helm for storage or as a large fish well which still allows "walk around" fishing.

Steve

 

http://youtu.be/RRY0ZNH8-VE

 

how about one of these

 

Steve - thanks for the links. I did not realize that "tournament style" meant that but I can see the "open floor plan" (to use a house reference) style is what I had in mind.

I read some other posts about the length to beam ratio and it seems clear that almost every manufacturer is sticking to the tried and true 3 to 1 ratio which accounts for the narrowness. I think this is why I have been gravitating towards cats which dont have that same problem .

I see that you are in the Keys - which is where i hope to end up at with my boat. Is it possible to have a boat that can fish the back country/ flats and offshore 5-10 miles or do you have to choose and if you want to fish close in get a very shallow draft boat? i see that most private home docks are on very shallow canals, are people able to get good sized boats in and out of the canals or do they opt for a marina?

 

All boats are a compromise, and while there are boats that can do both offshore and back country they won't do either as well as a mission specific boat.

Oceanside in the Keys there are three types of water, Hawks Channel (1) inside the reef, semi protected, the reef (2) for bottom fish and just off them oceanside for larger predators, and then (3) offshore for dolphin, wahoo, other offshore species. If you pick your days you can take almost anything offshore in the summer, the weather is pretty predictable. I've seen pontoon boats on the reef amd flats boats offshore.

On the "bayside" or "backside" in the upper Keys, thats where the ICW runs.
6' + with plenty of marked channels through to the Oceanside. Outside the channel can go to 0ft real fast, thats flats boat country and in the upper Keys it's Everglades National Park North of the ICW, the rules are, ahh different. You DO NOT want to find the bottom the hard way back there, the Feds have no sense of humor.

This an oversimplified and nebulous description, but it's two paragraphs.

Throughout the 100+ miles of the Keys there are all kinds of canal and waterfront homes with a wide variety of water depth. Almost all of them will have the draft for even a large OB powered boat. Many will carry 5-6' + with no problem. No one with a dock uses a marina. Where did you get the idea Keys canal front homes all had shallow canals?

The Keys are shallow in many places by the depth standards of "other" places, many transplants have a hard time running with just a foot or two under the keel when they are used to plenty more, but it's the Keys and there are plenty of boats that need 4 or 5 feet that get around just fine, you just need local knowledge if you step out of the channel.

Any of the boats I linked to fish very well, and while I like cats I would have no problem doing hard core fishing from any of the boats I linked to. I don't believe any of them have any "problem," to the contrary they are Florida fishing boats designed to fish Florida waters which they all do very well.

I took a look at the aerocat power cats you mentioned, and they don't work for me and I can't see them at home in the Keys at all.


Steve

 

Thanks again - very good information! I was concerned about getting out of home canals because as I look at the charts heading north out of some of the Lower Keys (Sugarloaf, Big Coppit, and Big Pine) there doesnt seem to be a channel - mostly just 1-2 feet of depth for a long ways.

 

I had a friend who wanted a boat that could plane and travel well at slow speeds and be able to dash across Lake St. Clair in a blow. He wanted it to be able to plane, so he could get somewhere in a reasonable amount of time. He wanted to go slow well so he could follow the ore freighters up the Rouge River at three knots or less. And he wanted it to be able to handle rough weather because Lake St. Clair could get quite rough with little warning.

To improve the seaworthiness, I wanted a generous, highly cambered foredeck and a sharp bow.

When I started doing the math from some of my sketches, I noticed a real problem. The weight and thrust of the engines needed something up front to counter balance them. And that thing had to be pretty far forward. The only other heavy object that would always on be the boat was the skipper.

I then started looking at pictures of runabouts and noticed that the seating on all of them was actually quite far forward, so I knew it wasn't necessarily bad math on my part.

In order to get the long foredeck and make the math come out right, I had to add ballast under the foredeck. This added 200 lbs to the weight of the boat, but under this circumstance may have been tolerable, as my friend was not particularly worried about high top speed. He just wanted reasonable top speed. Reasonable being somewhere between 15 and 20 mph.

Perhaps this might be the answer your looking for.
The short decks are for floating trim reasons.

 

Heading North out of those Keys is straight into the back country, skinny water only. There is nothing back there except flats fishing and mosquitos. The ICW switches to Hawks Channel on the Oceanside at the 7 mile bridge just South of Marathon.

The charts don't show everything.

Steve