My son & I are working toward building a pontoon boat for extremely shallow
water. Our current plans call for what looks almost like two small
"jonboats" as pontoons (sealed across the top, of course). It's not quite
flat-bottomed but more like a squashed oval.
We felt that the near-flat-bottom design will spread the load across a wider
area resulting in less draft, which is our goal as I'm in Central Florida
(he's in Chicago and flies down often for our fishing trips) and most of our
best fishing - or our favorite fishing - is in the Everglades area where the
water can be as shallow as 6" and hold good fish.
I have two sailboats, a pontoon boat and several small open fishing boats,
and we have tried them all and managed to "beach" ourselves almost every
trip ... (Didn't say we were particularly good sailors ...).
Anyway - our squashed-oval concept is our next attempt, but it's now in the
approaching-the-drawing-board phase.
The deck will be very low above the pontoons, not at all like my 20'
store-bought pontoon boat. That's too high above the water for comfortably
hurling a cast net or hoisting a big fish. Or for pushing that heavy momma
out of thigh-deep Everglades mud ...
We'll build the pontoons large enough (we hope) to avoid submarining ...

BTW - On my store-bought pontoon boat, I removed the front and front-half of
the sides of the aluminum fence around the deck, and moved the remaing sides
and back out to the very edge of the deck, gaining a little more than 2"
each way - that's 4" in width. Makes a very noticable difference. The fence
had been wasting space all the way around the deck.
Removing the front fence makes such an incredible difference in the overall
comfort for a couple of fishermen that I can't imagine why everybody who
fishes from a pontoon boat (a 20'x 8' private fishing platform) hasn't taken
theirs off.
I'd post a foto somewhere, if anybody wants to see it.

That's enough outta me - thanx for reading/replying

chip

"MRusson" wrote in message
...
Dear Group,
In an earlier post i mentioned my project being a pontoon boat. I
have run into conflicting information about the shape of the pontoon
versus bouyancy of the pontoon. Can someone enlighten me on this
subject? Large flat bottomed pontoons versus round pontoons? Thanks
folks...


M Russon