HOW TO BERTHA PILOTHOUSE BOAT

Look around any marina in the UK or abroad and you will almost always see a fleet of small pilothouse motorboats dotted around the pontoons.

- Jon Mendez

With their enclosed wheelhouses, safe walkaround decks and facilities for overnighting, this style of craft has become extremely popular with everyone from solo skippers to first-time family buyers and amateur anglers in search of year-round adventures. The only downside of this design is that it creates a lot of windage close to the bow relative to the size and weight of the boat, making the early single-engine shaft-drive boats notoriously tricky to berth.

These days they are almost all fitted with single or twin outboard engines giving better manoeuvrability at slow speeds as well as more performance when cruising, but the issue of a lightweight boat with lots of windage forward still applies when it comes to berthing. The trick is to berth stern-to the elements wherever possible so that the bow is less prone to being blown off course.

The only downside of outboards is that the small propellers used on these fast-revving engines give less thrust at tick-over. This means you need to master the art of adding a puff of revs to give control when manoeuvring, as at tick-over alone there often isn’t enough drive to overcome all that windage. By a puff I mean raising the revs just enough to give the propeller some bite. It may be as little as an extra 100 revs but it can make all the difference.