HookedOnFishingBoats.com

The weatherman is calling for 20-knot winds and five foot seas, and there are small craft warnings posted. Good thing we’re not on a small craft—Hatteras’s 64 is anything but.

With a hefty 100,000 pounds of displacement this boat has an uncanny ability to flatten waves, as it proved when we charged out to the edge of the reef. The good news: there’s been a decent sailfish bite here lately. The bad news: to zig-zag along the drop-off, we’ll have to troll with our beam to the seas. I don’t care how big a boat you’re talking about, if it’s designed with a lot of deadrise to split open waves a rolling beam sea can get uncomfortable. But we stayed on the troll all day, without too much rocking and rolling. Stability comes thanks to a variables-degree deadrise bottom, which starts out convex at the entry then tapers down from 21-degrees amidships to a mere two-degrees at the transom. There’s just one thing wrong with all that heft and the great hull design it rides on: make a few canyon runs and you’ll chew through enough diesel to buy some Saudi prince a new Hummer. Of course, if you’re shopping around for a 60-plus-footer, you probably aren’t worried too about operating expenses.

I’d like to say all that trolling in the trough paid off, but truth be told just one skinny sailfish attacked our ‘hoo. Watching the baits was great, though, because there’s a huge mezzanine with comfy cushions facing aft in the cockpit. Under those cushions there's a bait freezer that is immense, and can hold an entire season’s worth of bait—literally. We only set out six lines during the test, but between the gunwale-mount rodholders, a trio of rocket launchers running down the bridge wings, and a full complement of bridgedeck rocket launchers, you can troll a dozen lines without even trying hard. Teaser reels are integrated into the hard top, and the catch goes into two integrated fishboxes that are literally big enough to lie down in at 5’5” long.

Why would you want to lie down in those fishboxes in the first place? Beats me—there are far more comfortable places to rest up in the cabin. In fact, the interior of this boat takes top honors for the fru-fru factor. Woodwork glows with multiple coats of varnish, cherry blinds and valences are designed to integrate and hide the air conditioning duct work, and the entire décor is color coordinated. Hey, this might be a fishboat, but Hatteras knows who really holds the purse strings in the family and they’re going to make sure Mom's happy about buying this boat, too—even on days when there’s a small craft warning.

Hatteras’s web site is www.hatterasyachts.com.