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Al Marvelli wrote: > nice links kent. > > you dont happen to know anyone on th east coast who has one do you? > > aluminum boats seem like the way to go, much less hassel if they are built > right. havent seen many medium size ones tho. we have the little > sears boats and then big crew boats like our 42 ft lafyeco. ive been looking for > a small boat the 25 ft workskiff w/ pilot house looks nice. > > ive seen these sites, and would like to see the boats in person. > the ones you have been on are center cons right? any experience with the pilot > house models? Hi Al: I don't know why you don't see these types of boats out there. You can find lightweight riveted "tin can" boats like Lunds and a million lightweight aluminum bass boats all over the US. But the really heavy duty welded aluminum work boats built for ocean conditions seem to be fairly regional to the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. I don't know why that is. They aren't as pretty as glass boats so it might be partly marketing and they aren't as easy to manufacture in large volume so they don't lend themselves to Bayliner or SeaRay type volume. It's mostly small regional companies that build them up by hand. The pilot house design is kind of an all weather work boat. My choice would probably be an open center console or else one with a forward console and canvas cover. You pound a lot more if you sit up front but that's the tradeoff for staying dry (in the rain). I used to have an 18 ft open center console aluminum skiff with a 75 hp outboard. I used that thing year-round diving for crab and scallops. In the winter we would just don the drysuits at the dock and wear ski goggles, fleece-lined rubber work gloves, fleece ski caps, and float coats over the drysuits to stay warm in the wind and spray. It wasn't big enough to carry doubles and tech gear for a properly staged deep wreck dive but it was fine to carry 3 divers and 6 single tanks to local dive sites in a 50 mile radius. You see aluminum boats everywhere up here. Just about everyone in Juneau owns a boat it seems and there may be more aluminum boats than glass up here. The really heavy duty welded aluminum skiffs are the seine skiffs used by salmon and herring seine boats. Those guys rig heavy rubber bumpers all around them for bouncing off other boats and the rocks. You could probably drop one of those heavy seine skiffs from 100' up onto concrete and then just sail it away. They fish these in all sorts of horrendous conditions. The typical seine skiff is a 20-25 ft high walled skiff with a center console and a big post behind the console for towing out the seine net. They wouldn't make great dive boats because the walls are too high. But you know they are tough or they wouldn't be used for this. A lot of the 32' Bristol Bay gillnet boats are aluminum. The Bristol Bay salmon fishery up on the Bering Sea is the biggest and most intense salmon fishery in the world. The State limits vessel size to 32 ft so you end up with these absolutely monster 32' gillnetters that can run at 40 knots and pack amazing amounts of salmon. The Bristol Bay fishery is a total combat fishery. The gun goes off and all the boats are trying to set each other down and get the best position. Boats are crashing against each other all over the place. Some of them line their gunnels with old tires just like tug boats and it can be like bumper cars with fishermen screaming at each other and boats slaming against one another. As far as utility work boats that would make good dive boats. The Work Skiff and Pacific Skiff links I gave you before are among the most heavy duty welded skiffs on the market. One neat thing about them is that they have welded double hulls so that you can rip the bottom open and it will still float. Some other brands? I have one neighbor 2 houses away who's a US Coast Guard officer who has an 18' Duckworth which is a very tough looking aluminum skiff. He runs it year-round pulling crab pots and does big trips out to the outer coast which is over 100 miles from here. Duckworth boats are made in Oregon. The company is known for making aluminum river boats that are used on the Columbia and snake rivers. So you know they are used to beating on rocks. See: http://www.duckworthboats.com/ My neighbor on the other side has an Almar which are made in Tacoma Washington. He uses it on some insane long-distance trips and winter hunting trips. Almar makes an assortment of commercial and pleasure boats including some heavy duty RIBs for commercial use. See: http://www.almarboats.com/ My neighbor across the street has an Alumaweld which are pretty nice looking boats but I don't think they are quite as heavy duty as the others I just listed. See: http://www.alumaweldboats.com/ Well, you get the point. There are aluminum boat manufacturers all over the place up here and in the Pacific Northwest and you see them everywhere. We have some big water up here but most of the boating is done on the inside waters where the weather and seas can still be fierce but you don't see the really heavy seas that you get out on the open ocean. For running up and down fjords and poking around all the different islands these boats are about perfect because you can run them up on beaches and they trailer easily. But you'd definitely want something a lot bigger and more seaworthy for venturing offshore into the open North Pacific. But no one does any offshore diving around here because we don't have the same shallow continental shelf. If you run 30 miles out into the North Pacific you'll be in thousands of feet of water. -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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