
Photo: Chris Rabil
By Christopher Swanhart
The construction of marine vessels has long relied on multiple kinds of materials. Starting with wood, other techniques developed and continue to evolve including steel, aluminum, fiberglass, high tech foam cores, exotics like carbon fiber, and…wood. The sportfishing world employs many of these for different reasons. This discussion is centric to higher performance planing hulls, so we’ll examine wood and various composites, metal doesn’t make sense for this segment. Like they say, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.