We bought a boat! She is being built in Florida and will be ready for pick-up just about the time we head back to the U.S. While it is the most exciting thing going on in my fishing world at the moment, I realize that not everyone will be as excited as I am. So I promise not to post about it too much.
Buying a boat turned out to be surprisingly difficult. (Well, buying the boat was easy, all I had to do was find my credit card!) Not so long ago, buying a boat was like buying a car. I would have driven my nearest dealership and bought a boat from their lot, but today, through the magic of the internet, I was able to consider a huge variety of styles and brands, and to eventually order a customized boat directly from the builder. So the difficulty for me was deciding which boat to buy. I though it might be instructive to someone, someday, to write down how I waded through the difficulty to finally come to a decision I felt good about.
Tom Mitzlaff wrote a nice essay about buying a boat over on the SuperStick website, which I found helpful. The key advice he gave was this:
Ask yourself : What will I be doing 90% of the time?
Then buy a skiff that will do it !!
This advice is not as easy to follow as it sounds. I had to carefully consider as many variables as I could imagine, and be very honest with myself about the answers. For example, it would sure be nice to have a boat big enough to take all our friends and family out on the river when they visit once or twice a year, but ultimately I’d rather have a boat that is small and light enough for me to easily handle alone the other 100+ days I’m fishing.
So here are the main points I considered:
- I will be fishing alone most of the time.
- I will be fly-fishing for carp.
- I will often cover 10-20 miles of water in a day.
The boat I finally decided on was the Marsh Hen from Dragonfly Boatworks. She is 15 feet long, but only 4 feet wide. This makes her very light, easy to trailer, launch and fish from solo. It also makes her less stable than a wider boat, but I am not a big person and I have been fishing from inflatable boats and SUP boards for years so this will be fine, for me. She will be built with a bow mounted trolling motor, a feature that I believe will be almost essential to fishing alone in 2-5 feet of water, especially in the wind. She is designed specifically for fly fishing to spooky fish. The deck is free of the bits that like to tangle a fly line and there are rod holders built to accommodate fly rods. The hull has a low profile and is very quiet when moving through the water, something I almost overlooked as it has been a while since I was reminded just how sensitive carp can be. Finally, I am having her built with a center console for more comfort and better handling when making longer runs, especially in breezy conditions.
The photos above are other peoples’ Marsh Hens. The second photo is more similar to our build with a trolling motor on the bow and a small center console. Our boat hull has come out of the mold, but the pieces need to be assembled and then she will have to be rigged:
The Fishing Dojo 