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List: trawlers@lists.trawlering.com

From: Faure, Marin

Boat usage (was Top 5/nose,tail,top,bottom)

Tue, Oct 23, 2007 10:59 PM

e familiar with every boat configuration on the planet and so know that you are absolutely right, you will most likely be proven wrong. In the late 1940s-early 50s there was in Hawaii a whole fleet of some of the most beautiful boats I've ever seen. Locally, they were called "sampans," I believe because this is the Japanese word for smooth-sided wood planking (as opposed to lapstrake). The crews tended to be Japanese-Americans, and perhaps they were built by Japanese-American shipwrights as well, hence the name. They were all in the 70 to 80 foot range, fairly narrow, most of them powered by a single GM 6-71. It would be a waste of time to try to describe the boats verbally, but I do have a photo or two I'll be happy to e-mail someone if they're interested. They were beautiful boats and were worked well into the 1970s when the nature of the tuna fishery began to change to long-range, long-duration, long-line fishing. They were also called "aku boats", "aku" being the Hawaiian word for tuna (bonito or albacore, can't remember which, the other one is "kava kava" and yellowfins are "ahi.") And that's what they did--- went out every day in search of schools of tuna which were caught by shoveling live bait into a school as the boat moved slowly forward and then casting huge chrome, barbless hooks into the feeding frenzy going on at the stern and levering the tuna aboard. They did this in some amazingly rough water, the Molokai Channel being one of the popular areas. These boats were as seaworthy as I've ever seen or been on, yet their undersides had a lot in common with boats like Grand Banks. Hard chines, almost flat afterbody, deep keel, deep forefoot. This is just one example of a boat type that-- by your definition-- should have stayed tied to the dock when the waves kicked up. But these guys went out every day no matter what. Many of the locally built, smaller charter boats ("haole sampans") used similar hull forms, I assume because they found the shorter (but snappier) rolling motion of the hard-chine, flat-afterbody hull was preferable to their activities in Hawaii's rough water than the longer, slower roll of a deep, soft-chine hull. As I said earlier, it's a mistake to make definitive statements about What Should Be when there are so many variables involved. What works in Hawaii may not be the best solution in Greece, or on the Mississippi, or in the North Sea, or on the Inside Passage. And a hull configuration you may believe is inefficient, or incorrect, or a waste of time, or not a "real" boat, may prove to be very much a "real" boat in the environment for which it was designed. For forty years the aku boats with their "underpowered, semi-planing" hull forms worked in waters that scared the crap out of pretty much everyone except open-ocean sailboaters. To see an aku boat in action, cutting like a destroyer through the confusion of swells and waves in the Molokai Channel on her way to a tuna school, was one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen on the water. ______________________________ C. Marin Faure GB36-403 "La Perouse" Bellingham, Washington

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