Sea Ark Bay with tunnel

[thunter]

Thinking about buying the 20.1' BayRunner MVT or the BayFisher MVT. Anyone have good or bad thoughts on them? How does it handle in ruff water? Will it wet you?
Where is the best place to purchase one? Thanks in advance.

[Badbagger]

I have an 1872 MV no TUNNEL. Until VERY recently, I THOUGHT I wanted a tunnel. No thanks not for me. As far as a SeaArk, pretty solid boats. I'd highly recommend trim tabs, well worth the investment. Really smooths things out in the chop.

[Salty Gator]

Big bend marine in perry carry sea arks. Fred Morgan will treat you right.

[thunter]

Thnx for the info. Why did you decide against the tunnel? I've never been in one. Ran into the fwc and he was in the tunnel and said he had been in 2 yrs and would not have another boat.

[Badbagger]

PM sent, check your in box. Tunnel hulls in a nut shell draft MORE water than a typical flat bottom boat. Take any two IDENTICAL hulls set up the very same way one being a tunnel and the other say a modified v or a flat bottom and sit them side by side in the water. The tunnel hull will draft MORE than your non-tunnel boat. Yes, tunnel hull boats are able to RUN skinny but IF a flat bottom/modified V is PROPERLY set up, it's going to run pretty darn skinny. Back to drafting, running skinny is great but I want to FISH skinny which means I'm cutting off my engine or pulling out the trolling motor. That tunnel hull will DRAFT more than that non-tunnel hull all day long. To me, it's about FISHING skinny more so than running skinny. I just had this conversation with another board member on the phone last week and he's been rigging boats for a LONG time and he too thought he wanted a tunnel hull until he chatted with engineers at a manufacturer for a good while. They talked him out of it.

Yes, you can add float pods to the hull as most do but you still may well draft MORE all day long. There are trade offs in any boat and that's a BIG one with a tunnel hull. Get a good modified V or flat bottom with a jack plate and the RIGHT prop and you can RUN skinny all day long. I only want to RUN and FISH so skinny. Truth be told, my trolling motor will bottom out before my boat and I have ZERO interest in poling one heavy arse boat hundreds of yards anyway. There are also SEVERAL other issues to contend with - Prop Tunnel vs Jet Tunnel, prop blow out and on and on and on Just my take and surely there will be others and FYI, I ran this VERY same thing by a very well respected manufacture just this week and pretty much typed just what I have here and his response was "you're absolutely correct"....

Bagger out

[guthooked]

Bagger is correct about the floating draft. The tunnel will draft just slightly more, were talking an inch or so. I have a kenner tunnel 2103 and I don't know if I would buy another one. I am not unhappy with it, I just wouldn't go out of my way to hunt another one down. The one thing I don't like about it is that if you go to make a hard turn at high speeds (suddenly see a log floating) the back end will blow out on you. This is a little startling the first time it happens. Like powersliding a car on a wet road. One more thing, a tunnel doesn't gain you anything without a jack plate. I am certainly no expert, just speaking from my experiences.

[charlie tuna]

I have a SeaArk 18, which i stripped everything out of the hull, then decked the entire boat using foamboard and glassed over. The tunnel design creates a continous wall of water for the engine to function in. The only time the tunnel comes into use is extream shallow water operation. On the boat on a plane, the boat will rise up 8 to 10 inches when over shallow water. The wall of water created by the tunnel allows the engine to preform pushing the boat forward. I have run over some very thin water, not on purpose, but very suprised that the boat never bogged down.