I don't know if I'd be all that keen on adding pods to the stern of a small boat. An outboard performs best when set back away from the transom not in it. I played around with a small glass boat that had that sort of configuration and what kept happening was that the prop came up out of the water too far as the hull rose up on plain making it necessary to lower the motor to maintain prop bite on the water. In other words the point of rise began further rearward as the boat rode up on the water and instead of the motor remaining in the water it rose up with the hull.
In many ways it acted more like a displacement hull with an inboard than a light outboard and gained many of the negative characteristics of a tunnel hull.
130lbs is double the weight of what works best on those hulls. Adding a couple square feet of flotation isn't going to amount to much overall and will likely change the characteristics of the boat for the worse.
At only 4.5ft wide those are narrow transoms. Keep in mind that in 1967 a 20hp didn't break the 100lb mark and your now exceeding that by 30%.
Ad into the fact that they calculated avg, passenger weight at under 160lbs or so. Electric start, power tilt/trim, fish finders, and lugging around a 40 lb battery and 40 lbs of tackle wasn't the norm.
They were great boats but not capable of carrying a lot of weight thus the 850lb rating. Today that's two adult men, a cooler full of beer, 50 lbs of tackle and a 10hp two stroke at best. Start calculating the other little items like the anchor and rope, electronics, bait bucket, tools, flares, life vests, fenders, and any other small items added plus fuel and your at or over that 850 pretty quick,
Boats never do well running at their maximum weight, and if that weight is mostly at the stern its far worse, You end up with a boat that wants to point to the sky and dig a hole in the water around it every time you crack open the throttle.
I'm not saying don't try it but be aware its far from ideal and the chances of it sitting so low in the water when your at the helm its going to be in risk of not having enough freeboard on acceleration,
You would be in far better shape if that were the 16ft version of that hull or with a lighter motor.
I'd keep an eye out for a deal on a later version of that hull, in the 1990's they made a wider version that was shared with or came from their sister company Smokercraft. Smokercraft sold it as the Alaskan 15, I had one for a while that I ran a 35hp tiller motor on. It was rated at 35hp and more than 100 lbs more weight due to the higher sides and wider beam width. I wish I never sold it. It was a 14ft hull that acted and felt like a 16ft boat without the weight. With a 35hp Johnson on it the thing was brutally fast and still had 4"of freeboard at the transom with me sitting on the rear bench with the fuel tank and batteries also in the rear,
Four strokes weren't even a thought back then, boat manufacturers making aluminum boats at that time were not much more than 10 years from the day when they were still making airplane fuel tanks and many were still using tooling set in place for the war effort in the early '40's.
The Seafarer hulls went pretty much unchanged from the mid to late 50's till the late 70's when the wood benches were replaced with stamped one piece aluminum seats reinforced with poured in foam. vs the chunks of polystyrene that filled the older seats after around 1958 or so and at some point all three bench seats gained flotation foam. The newer urethane foam was more resistant to gasoline where as the older polystyrene turns to gooey paste when it contacts oil or gas.
The lapstrake hull was new for 1960, and ran basically unchanged until late 1979 when they added the new style seats, Then it ran unchanged until the hull gained width and a bit of length. (I've seen '79 models that had the new seats and a few that still had the older mahogany benches). I sort of preferred the wood benches because they were easy to remove but they were also heavier and were prone to rot as they got old.
There were also three 14ft open hulls in the earlier days starting with the Sea Scamp, then Super Duty, and the Seafarer. HP ratings were all over the place and were as high as 40hp on the 14ft Seafarer with a 52" transom.
The hull went unchanged but ratings varied without much reasoning but as standards came about the ratings went down. A lot of that was due to them taking into account the true weight of most folks who used these boats.
The best I can figure is that they must have used 10 year old kids to estimate their weights in the older boats. I had an 80's Grumman 14ft V hull that had a coast guard plate that said 8 persons or 460lbs max with a 25hp max on a 15" x 54" transom. An Identical Lowe hull from the same year and likely from the same production line read 5 persons or 880lbs and a 35hp max hp rating with the exact same measurements. The two boats were identical in every way other than color and the fact that the Grumman had different style seat benches with padding on top. Both shared identical transom panels, outer hulls and corner caps. With a 300 lb man at the helm neither one had enough freeboard to be comfortable running the same 20hp motor.
from 1961:
That's good for the forum!
