ride, but only now that I’ve experienced it myself can I fully appreciate that. Again I spent much time thinking about my experience on the Butt Cat 865 off Cape Agulhas and remembering that craft’s ride and ability to track evenly in a big following sea which I couldn’t experience on the day of the review. What I really appreciated on the day of the review was the boat’s high speed performance over small chop, especially when I was photographing. I particularly noticed just how smooth her ride was and also how little water was thrown at these speeds. A look at the accompanying photographs will show this, especially the one of the craft following the photo boat at over 20 knots where the cleaved water is spread low and wide and there’s marginal build-up of hard water in the tunnel. Even though this 25ft hull was designed to target tuna way offshore, there are plenty of applications for this size craft off the rest of the east coast of South Africa and Moçambique. For this reason I put her through a vigorous routine of tight turns and out-the-hole trials in order to ascertain how I feel she would react to being beach launched off sites such as Sodwana Bay. Every craft has its idiosyncrasies and I needed to see how she fared. Throughout the sea trials I had experienced her out-thehole acceleration and ability to get up and running very quickly, but what I needed to feel was how quickly she would do an abrupt about turn and then dig in her aft and climb up onto the plane. She performed with ease and I found the previously mentioned stern stability had no hindering effect in bringing her around in a tight turn. During this manoeuvre I used the outside motor under major thrust while the inside motor was just used to control the thrust until the turn had been completed. All worked very smartly with no indication of cavitation nor any tendency of the inside chine to bite. I did this many times swinging both to port as well as to starboard.
For this application I would have preferred a larger diameter steering wheel and not as direct a hydraulic lock-to-lock turn. These are great for this particular craft’s application but if surf work is envisaged I would change it as mentioned. It is always interesting to test the wake pattern a specific hull generates when trolling throughout various fishing manoeuvres. Slow trolling with only one motor was effortless, but it got more interesting trolling with both motors and watching her wake develop as I increased the revs to 900rpm for 5 knots, to 1 400rpm for 7 knots, and on to 1 800rpm for 9 knots. She produces a very flat wake which is tight up to just on 8 knots and thereafter slowly spreads out. I was very happy with the wake and the ample clean water she produced where I could run lures in the typical pattern we use. The power source provided on the Butt Cat 25 was a pair of well-used 140hp Suzuki four-stroke motors swinging threebladed 20-pitch stainless steel props. They provided as much if not more power than I required, and even when running her with one motor with the other trimmed right up I got her to plane at close to 20 knots using maximum throttle, but was able to back off the throttle to 4 500rpm and still plane at 16/17 knots. As I stated, this craft was designed and made for a specific use and its owner was very definite in what he wanted in the way of deck layout and cubby-cabin interior design fitment. “Suitable for tuna fishing” was the only criterion. With this in mind a number of changes were effected apart from the Butt Cat’s hull itself. The major changes included increasing the height of the gunnels and stepping up the deck at the forward end of the cabin, and the inclusion of a huge, insulated, abovedeck fish box and twin 140 litre fuel tanks which were incorporated in the false transom. The extra high gunnel height was to suit the owner’s physical stature and his preference and style of stand-up fishing when attached to a large tuna. A small step in the walkaround space to the front deck area makes it easier to move
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