I owned that same boat and experienced the same problems. The relatively wide beam makes it worse than other boats.
I never experienced the kind of problems you did in Tampa Bay. If I hand steered I could control it in 4-5' seas from the stern but I did give the rudder a workout. These were relatively long period waves off of Catalina Island that I was dealing with which reduced the effort relative to your Tampa Bay situation.
For the longer period waves I faced, I pretty well solved the problem by adding the gyro add on black box to the Raymarine autopilot. It damped the S turns down to 5-10 degrees from a previous 15-25 degrees on autopilot.
Not sure any modern trawler design is really going to solve it for you. The canoe stern of the Willard 40 should however.
I recall the late Bill Crealock telling me why he designed most of his sailboats- the Pacific Seacraft line for example, with canoe sterns. To paraphrase him, he said that in some conditions the stern needs to act like a bow.
David
|