HookedOnFishingBoats.com

We’ve got 3,100 diesel horses going wild in the engineroom and 72,000 pounds of fantasy boat roar across the waves at over 45-mph – glorious is the best way to describe this feeling. The last finishing touches were put on the 63 just moments ago, and now the Salty is strutting her stuff for the first time, here on the Chesapeake Bay. Tomorrow morning she’s leaving for Mexico, where this custom-designed pelagic fish-killing machine will spend its time chasing yellowfin tuna, billfish, and wahoo. But today, she’s all ours.

Water Cannon

Like all Weavers this boat was built with a lot of customer input and in this case, the customer’s captain, noted sportfisher Josh Temple. Net result? The Salty integrates several fishing features that few other boats can boast of. Take the tuna tubes, for example. There are four built into each gunwale, but unlike most they’re oval instead of round. This prevents live baits from spinning inside the tube, a common problem which robs the bait of energy. Now check out the plumbing system that feeds those tubes, by swinging up the aft deck hatch. There’s a manifold system here, with valves that can be used to control the flow to each individual tube so it can be adjusted (up to 1,800-gph) to best support whatever sized bait is in it at any time. Remember: tunas need to swim twice their own body length every second to remain healthy, so there’s a big difference between keeping a 14” skippie and a 24” bonito in good shape.

The same manifold system also feeds the live bait tanks. Those tanks, by the way, provide enough capacity to keep the entire cast of Blue Planet alive for weeks at a time. There’s a 250-gallon main tank in the center of the cockpit, a transom tank that’s a hair over 100-gallons, and a 90-gallon auxiliary tank in the deck. Doesn’t it take a heck of a lot of water to feed all these tubes and tanks? You bet—the system is powered by a pair of 1.5-hp Hayward Jacuzzi pumps. In the unlikely event that both Haywards go up at the same time or a genset failure leaves them powerless, a 12-volt Rule pump system backs up the entire operation.

Why is so much invested in live bait capabilities? Because owner Steve Danziger and Capt. Temple like to fish with livies when they go one the hunt out of Puerto Vallarta, and they built this boat to be the ultimate machine for their methods of fishing. Another favored tactic is kite fishing, and any experienced kiter knows that on calm days you might need a helium balloon to keep your lines in the air. Swing up the hatch on the stowage compartment under the bridgedeck ladder (yes, of course it swings up effortlessly on gas-assist struts) and you’ll find a small yellow tube waiting to inflate those balloons via a permanently-mounted helium tank in the engineroom.

Now check out the bridgedeck rocket launchers. There are 15 lining the rail, plus three per side on the supports. Gunwales have three rodholders in each side, and there’s another in the transom. There are also four holders mounted in the top of the bait tank, bringing the cockpit total to 32. The boat can carry twice that many, when the rod stowage under the settee and the slide-out rodrack under the dinette are packed full. You’d like to target marlin one day, wahoo the next, and deep-drop on day three? Don’t worry, you won’t have trouble stowing all of those rods and reels.

Smart Bombs

Yet another custom touch that fits the way these guys fish is the electronics package. The boat has four different transducers so it can see down, out, and all around. A super-low 28-khz ‘ducer allows the Furuno Navnet system to touch bottom when you measure depth by miles, instead of fathoms. A retractable 18” dome transducer drops down out of the hull bottom to feed data to a CH 250, a sweeping sonar that’s usually found on commercial boats only. It can detect targets up to 1,000’ away and when we kicked it on and took a look 360-degrees around, Temple turned on the stereo system to show off another unique feature: you can hear the clicks and pings of the sonar right through the stereo speakers. Since the captain can hear returns as well as see them on-screen, this frees him up to pay attention to the spread, glass for birds, or whatever else he needs to take care of.

The electronics suite is viewed on three 15” VEI screens, and is backed up with a completely independent Garmin 4212 chartplotter/fishfinder. A 64 mile open array radar gets backup as well, with a 36 mile radome. And yes, of course there’s a FLIR thermal imaging camera tied into the system. In fact, there’s also a through-hull camera so you can quite literally see the fish you drive over. All of these feeds (plus engineroom cameras, satellite TV, and DVDs) can be viewed on any of the VEIs at the helm—or in the salon, the cockpit, or the tower’s upper station, which all have monitors as well.

Drill Baby, Drill

Like other Weavers the Salty isn’t just a fishing machine, it’s a high-performance fishing machine. With a blazing top-end of 45.4-mph it rivals the fastest convertibles in this size range, and when we set the throttles at a 2000 RPM cruise, the boat maintained 40-mph even.

What about efficiency? Hey, no one ever claimed it was easy to get these speeds out of a 63’ boat, and the Salty does chug fuel fast enough to warm the heart of Texaco’s CEO. At 40-mph it burns 95.4-gph, to get 0.4 miles to the gallon. A Smart Car, it is not. Still compare that to other 60+ sportfishers, and you’ll find it’s above the average of 0.3 miles to the gallon. Besides, if you want to play in the big leagues you have to pay like a big leaguer. One thing’s for sure: you’ll certainly feel like one, gazing down from the bridge of a 63’ Weaver as you strut 72,000 pounds of glorious fish-killing stuff.

Come back to www.HookedOnFishingBoats.com next week to read the second part of the Salty review and learn about this boat’s construction and interior.

Weaver’s web site is weaverboatworks.com.

LOA - 63’3”

Beam – 18’10”

Draft – 5’4”

Dry weight - 72,000

Fuel capacity - 1,505

Max. HP – 3,100

Price – About 2.2 million base, but you could spend another half mil customizing the boat.

Observed performance notes w/6 people and full load fuel, twin 1,550 HP CAT C32 diesel inboards swinging 32” x 45” five bladed nibral props:

Salty, Part II

Ready to look beneath this boat’s skin? A close-up of its heart and sole are where the Weaver’s real superiority shine through, because this boat’s construction not only effects looks and longevity, but also seakeeping and performance.

When I trialed the Salty, we were on a tame Chesapeake Bay. But I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that this boat runs through harsh conditions better then at least 90-percent of the production-built sportfishers in this size range for one simple reason, its cold-molded construction.

Here’s a simple fact: fiberglass sinks, and wood floats. Cold-molding melds the best properties of these two materials, giving you maximum strength, minimum weight, and easy maintenance. Essentially, this construction technique consists of constructing a wood boat then encapsulating it in fiberglass and/or epoxy. With wood coring throughout every major structure in the boat little fiberglass is needed for structural strength, and as a result the boat weighs far less then a molded fiberglass boat (note: the Weaver weighs 72,000-pounds while a Viking 64 weighs 105,000-pounds.) You can feel this underfoot, when you go charging through foamy oceanic whitecaps. Cold molds simply want to float. They sail over the bumps instead of pounding through them, and impacts are greatly reduced. What about strength? Are cold molds any less capable then molded glass boats? Heck no. In fact, depending on construction methods they may be appreciably stronger then their molded brethren.

Like many cold-molded sportfishing boats (including the likes of Rybovich, Bayliss, and Jarrett Bay,) the Weavers’ hull is based on triple-planked Okoume ply. When the Okoume is in place it’s sanded, faired, and sanded again multiple times to ensure a perfectly smooth surface.

Stringers are fashioned from Douglass Fir, and are capped by aluminum plates in the engineroom. The hull bottom and major structural components are encapsulated in a layer of Kevlar, and every inch of the boat is encapsulated in fiberglass and/or epoxy. When all is said and done the cold-molded machine looks every bit as good as one molded from fiberglass and requires the same regular maintenance, yet out-performs it hands-down. So, why don’t all builders cold-mold boats? It’s time consuming, expensive, and requires more highly skilled labor

Wood You Could You Should You?

One other benefit from cold-molding: the boat’s design can be shifted from one hull to the next. This is especially important when it comes to the boat’s interior, which is custom-designed for every individual owner. In the case of the Salty, this meant a cabin with private staterooms for the owner (with its own mini-bar, by the way,) the captain, a crew, and guests. A four stateroom layout means cutting smaller spaces for each room, and the Salty’s staterooms don’t feel incredibly spacious as a result. The crew’s quarters in particular, where the mate will reside, is pretty darn cramped. Suffer through it, dude, you live on a sportfishing yacht and spend all day hunting tunas and billfish.

The salon, however, is a completely different story. The Salty has a settee aft, a galley to port, and a dinette to starboard. Peek at the dinette table pedestal; it’s wider then the norm, because it has a wine chiller built into it. Sweet. Now note the rod box that slides out from underneath the dinette, which has room for a dozen big rigs. The countertops are real granite, and are fiddled. The sole is teak and holly. The entertainment center includes a zoned REI system with separate feeds for each room in the boat, and a 52” flat-screen TV pops out of a countertop at the press of a button. But the real kicker is the cabinetry. The grain throughout is bookmatched, so it flows uninterrupted from the sole to the overhead.

Few boats can match this interior – Rybovich and Bayliss come to mind – and only one I’ve ever tested, a Whiticar, surpassed it on an artistic level. And that boat had the heart and sole of an artist, not a hunter. The Salty? Just peek beneath that skin and you find an athlete. A body-builder. A hunter-killer. When this boat reaches Mexico, the fish had damn-well better beware.

Weaver has more pictures and info on their web site, www.weaverboatworks.com.

LOA - 63’3”

Beam – 18’10”

Draft – 5’4”

Dry weight - 72,000

Fuel capacity - 1,505

Max. HP – 3,100

Price – About 2.2 million base, but you could spend another half mil customizing the boat.

Observed performance notes w/6 people and full load fuel, twin 1,550 HP CAT C32 diesel inboards swinging 32” x 45” five bladed nibral props: