A boat's hull doesn't need to be thick to be strong..
Some manufacturers use cloth that is finer, has less density, have directional roving and a lower resin to cloth ratio.Vacuum bagging may also be part of the process and therefore the hull is lighter and....thinner!. Another manufacturer will use heavier mat (or gasp... chopped fiber) no vac bagging and have a thicker but inferior in strength to the thinner hull. Nordhavn actually puts the weight in ballast to make a safe, sea kindly hull.
I think the thing is that some of us .. or maybe it was just me, read that you inferred that the Nordhavn is somehow inferior because of the "thin" hull.
I have put my life at stake in a Nordhavn offshore at night for days on end in less than ideal conditions and I don't really care if the hull is thick or thin. I know it works as designed and built.
I used to be part of the drag boat racing world and we had hulls that weighed 400lbs and could withstand the torque of 4000 hp @ 250mph. If the hull was designed right all was well and it worked as it should. If the boat blew over it shredded into little tiny pieces. Just because it couldn't take the stress of a 200mph flip didn't make it a poor or inferior design.
HOLLYWOOD
I indeed said it was "thin". It looks thin to me. You're absolutely correct about a boat not having to be heavy to be strong, BUT we (me, yard manager, & some buddies of mine) were questioning where the weight of this boat is at, IF the hulls not thick?
As far as passage making. I recently sold a Wellcraft 43' Portifino, which is a cocktail Bay cruiser (what it was marketed as) and the buyer took her from Miami to Curacao on her bottom in Hurricane season non-stop (except for fuel of course) with no problems.
Back in the day, when I worked at Merrill-Stevens as a broker we had a yard full of seized drug boats out back. Several were big Carri Craft Houseboats (catamaran hulls) with gas engines that had delivered ton's of weed direct from Columbia to Miami non-stop running at pretty much WOT (so said one of the Captains) and one can argue neither the Carri-crafts OR the Wellcraft were designed to be passagemakers, but make passage they did. NOW I have respect for those marques because of what I saw, and know. I'm a big believer of what MY eyes see, and not what others tell me what they read. It's my experience, they're not the same.
I understand quality. I still own a 15' Hobie Power Skiff made of Kevlar. I bought her in 1988. It's still like new although it's been run hard it's whole life. Soon after purchasing, I shitcanned the 40hp Yamaha, and have been running it with a 90hp ever since. Light, thin, strong, but it was advertised as such, same as ALL the modern high performance boats like Contender and Intrepid. You ever looked at the weight of a Contender? And they have 3 or 4 outboards hanging off the back. Hatteras's are marketed as heavy boats, and they're so thick that they destroyed docks when Hurricanes picked them up and threw them on the street a quarter mile from the marina. I've never been able to look in one, but I've seen them gouged REAL deep, but never deep enough to be holed.
So I believe them, when they say they're heavy. There's plenty of photo documentation of them after Hurricanes (google up "Dinner Key Marina, Hurricane Andrew"). BERTRAM? There's plenty of photo evidence out there- of late model one's NOT so well built. Have I seen other boats that have fallen off jack stands? Yes, I have. I was surveying a 1939 NY 40'(model-not the length- MUCH longer)sailboat in Tarpon Springs that fell off the railway (broker told operator the draft was 6'- turned out to be 8') in 1982- and they picked her up with a crane, put her back on the railway, and she didn't even crack any ribs. Wood. Old. Just saying.
