STATEWIDE UGLY BOAT CONTEST
TO SPOTLIGHT HOMELY VESSELS
Fred Dyson – Dyson's Starboard View – Messing About in Boats
Boating Alaska is sponsoring an Ugly Boat Contest. The contest is statewide, and I’m the sole judge. My favorite selections will be printed in a future article.
I will be asking readers to make nominations, complete with pictures, of their candidate for the ugliest boat in Alaska. I will lay out the rules and the standards. There will be separate categories for stock-manufactured boats and for home-built boats.
I considered having an ugly sailboat contest, but I’ve never seen a really ugly sailboat, so I will forgo this area unless a reader comes up with a sailboat that turns the tide.
Hints that will help you hunt for a winner:
In a future article, I will spell out predispositions on confirmation of an ugly boat, but here for starters are my boat design prejudices.
- Square corners are ugly - When I was a wee lad, handling deck lines on my father's tug boat, he taught me that proper women and boats did not have ninety-degree corners. If he saw such on a vessel he would snort and mutter about, "seagoing abominations built by house carpenters." His comments on square corners on women might run afoul of local obscenity laws, but certainly don't lack for artistic flair.
- Pretentiousness is ugly - Your seafaring columnist detests boats (and people) who pretend or aspire to being what they are not. A gussied-up, fancy yacht that tries to look like a classic workboat causes the bile to rise in my bilges. Equally appalling are the mini-cruisers that try to put the accommodations and features of a forty-foot boat in a twenty-one-foot disaster. You end up with the seagoing equivalent of the Texas rancher that is "all hat and no cattle." The boat is all house and no hull. Great for parties at the dock and treacherous in a sea way.
- Pastel colors are ugly - Any color that looks good in a bathroom will look terrible on a boat. Boats should be the natural colors of the material like wood or aluminum or be painted full-bodied and full-blooded colors that aren't ashamed of what they are.
- Design dictated by the materials is ugly - I would not be caught dead (or alive if any alternative existed) in a boat that looked so synthetic that you figure the owner got it as a hostess bonus at a house party to sell plastic dishes. Similarly the boat design should not be overwhelmed by the fact that plywood comes in 4 x 8 sheets. Great marine abominations have resulted.
- No shear line is ugly - The shear line is the gently swooping line of the hull. Vessels that loose their shear are said to have 'hogged' and boats without shear are pig ugly to me. Some clever marine architects have designed a few good-looking boats with reverse shear that swoops up gently from the bow and then gracefully tapers to the transom (back of the boat). World War II Elco and Higgins PT boats were like that and looked good.
So there it is, shipmates. Sally forth and embarrass your friends by entering their boats in the Alaskan Ugly Boat Contest.
TOP MESSING ABOUT IN BOATS HOME