Education

Introduction

Introduction

 

If you go to the Miami Boat Show (or any other recreational boat show for that matter) you will see aisle upon aisle and dock upon dock of fiberglass boats.  The hullforms are endless - from funky catamarans to slow displacement hulls to high-speed monohulls. The recreational marine boat business is a fiberglass world*.

 

If you go to MACC (the Multi-Agency Craft Conference) hosted by the US Navy at the Navy Seal’s base in Virginia Beach every year you see (almost exclusively) “plate” aluminum alloy boats.

 

Weird, huh?  Why do you think that is?  What is so different between government/military mariners and recreational mariners?

 

Further – when you go to the Miami Show you’ll see a large contingent of truly deep-vee boats:  Yellowfin, Contender, Regulator, SeaVee, Jupiter, Intrepid and Midnight Express – the list is nearly endless.

 

Conversely – when you go to MACC you see very few deep-vee boats and these are usually some of the fiberglass deep-vees from the Miami Show painted gray to become “commercial” boats.   Gray paint does not make a boat commercial.  The aluminum alloy boats available are all 14-18 degree, light, modified-vee hulls with very flat “entries”.

 

Again, why?  Deep-vee at recreational shows and modified-vee at government shows?  Alloy at the military shows and fiberglass at the recreational shows?

 

In the chapters that follow we will explain this strange discrepancy between these two separate markets and Rock Salt’s goal of bridging the two.

 

Read on!

 

 

 

 

*for the purposes of this website and this book we are not discussing the low-end and small freshwater recreational marketplace for jonboats, Lunds, pontoon boats and such.  These are considered to be “sheet” metal boats and are a whole different category of boats…