- Joined
- Jan 16, 2009
- Location
- SouthEast Arkansas
You want real good info...........Its time I started sharing some of the files that I have uncovered in my digging around on the net. Hope ya enjoy this little tidbit.......specially the remark about the good ole boys in Arkansas
To appreciate how good today’s bass boats really are, we need to look back to the origins of the machines — not only as highly specialized fishing platforms, but also as an on-going testimony to the passionate efforts of the industry’s pioneers.
In telling this story, we’ve tried to interview the people who were involved in creating the earliest bass boats. For the most part, these first-person accounts are straightforward, but you may notice some inconsistencies in specific dates or details. Please be aware that time may fade or blur our memories.
Having said all that, we hope you enjoy reading these rare one-on-one conversations as much as we enjoyed conducting them.
Skeeter
In 1948, World War II was a recent memory, and the US economy was on an upswing with an average per capita income of nearly $1500 — an impressive figure for the times.
Columbia Records introduced the 33-1/3 rpm LP record, so now you could enjoy 25 minutes of uninterrupted music per side — compared to the 4 minutes on the 78 rpm discs that were the industry standard.
Anglers had their choice of traditional wood boats or the newer riveted aluminum hulls. Life was good.
A Better Boat
East Texas angler Holmes Thurmond usually is awarded the credit for building the first bass boat way back in 1948. Although Holmes is no longer with us, we tracked down his grandson, Butch Thurmond, who used to spend his summer vacations in the mid-50s with his grandfather.
Holmes Thurmond loved to fish the waters near his home, however, he didn’t like the flat bottom hulls that were popular at the time. Dissatisfied with the limited selection of fishing boats on the market, he decided to make his own small craft.
“On windy days, he [Holmes] got tired of getting pushed around in the old flat-bottom-type boats that would grab the wind. That was before the days of trolling motors,” Thurmond tells us. “He came up with a design that wouldn’t get pushed around by the wind as easily. If you look at pictures of the early Skeeters, you’ll see what I mean. They have inward-sloping sides.”
The bottom of the boat Holmes Thurmond designed was quite a bit wider than the enclosed sides. Seated in one, you almost felt like you were in a box. There was plenty of room because the rods and tackle would fit off to the sides of the boat, on the bottom or up under the sloping sides.
It was also extremely stable. While fishing with his grandfather, Butch would sit on the little front deck with a sculling paddle. The boat was just about impossible to turn over, because even if you stood on the sides you’d actually be standing towards the middle of the boat.
Thurmond tells us his grandfather was not only an avid bass angler, but also a pioneer, which explains a lot about the design of his early bass boat. Holmes Thurmond was one of the first bass anglers to target structure by finding the edges of the old creek channels running through the lake.
“While I was paddling him around, I used to be the depthfinder. I’d drop an old window sash weight [on a line] so we could find the exact edge of them [the bass]. Then, we’d anchor back and cast out toward them in the deep water. We’d work our little worms up the edge and catch some really nice bass. And anytime another boat would come our way, my grandfather would turn around real quick and we’d cast towards the shallows, so they wouldn’t catch onto his new secret.”
Low, sleek and narrow, Thurmond’s little wood boat developed quite a following. Like a sharp-nosed bug, the boat zipped around the lakes, and soon people nicknamed it the Mosquito, or "Skeeter," for short.
The Skeeters’ popularity got the attention of a larger company that wanted to streamline the boat building process with a new material called fiberglass.
Thurmond had boats built, and even sold a few for a while, but finally ended up selling the rights to build fiberglass replicas of them to a company in Texas. Today, Holmes Thurmond still receives credit for being the inventor of the bass boat, although he never reaped much in the way of monetary rewards for it.
“Who would’ve ever known how lucrative building bass boats would become?” Butch Thurmond asks rhetorically. “Now of course I wish my name was Skeeter Thurmond — Skeeter Yamaha Butch Thurmond.”
Kenzie Baird
Many consider northern Arkansas the heart of the bass boat industry, but for the casual tourist driving through, one can’t help but wonder: How did fiberglass boat building ever get started in the Middle of Nowhere?
The answer? Kenzie Baird and Kenzie Craft Boats. Kenzie Baird was working in the aircraft industry in California in the late 1940s, building wind tunnel models and messing around with the cutting-edge composite called fiberglass.
In San Diego, Baird made a few homemade boats for fun. He noticed that some of the local boating clubs began group projects to build a fiberglass boat for each member. Although the process of making the project boats was, as Baird puts it “the awfullest mess you’ve ever seen,” the concept of a fiberglass boat inspired him.
About the same time that Butch Thurmond was out fishing with his grandpa in 1955, Baird moved from San Diego to rural Arkansas and found his new boat company. The manmade lakes in northern Arkansas were fairly new in the mid-50s, and there was no shortage of labor, so in retrospect, Baird’s decision to settle in Arkansas was a smart move.
Eventually, several major players in the bass boat business followed Baird’s lead and opened their doors in Arkansas as well. Today, the northwest corner of Arkansas is home to some of the finest bass boat manufacturers in the country.
Although Baird’s experience in making composite aircraft assemblies gave him somewhat of an upper hand in the ‘glass boat business, he discovered that blazing a new trail can be a lonely feeling. “It was kind of tough sledding because nobody knew anything about fiberglass.” Baird recalls. “I remember I took some ‘glass boats to a boat show in Springfield [Missouri], and I was the only one in the boat show with a fiberglass boat. It was a new material that was completely unproven.”
Beneath the Surface
Hull designs are fascinating. What’s equally interesting is why a certain builder chooses one type of bottom over another. It’s amazing how the builders’ personal on-the-water experiences dictate what kind of boats they make.
Being from the West Coast and boating on the ocean, Baird favored hulls that were solid rough-water boats. That’s why most Kenzie Craft boats featured a modified round bottom with a pretty fair-sized keel on them.
Seemingly minor design changes can make a big difference. Baird relates, “In the small boat, I got more effective width and more static stability by putting in a spray rail, and the hull came up from the outside of the spray rail. It was just a jog in the hull that formed a spray rail and made the boat a lot wider as it went up.”
Even though boats now come to life on a computer screen instead of on a drafting table, Kenzie Baird’s words still ring true: “Boat design is all a compromise. If you‘re going to get maximum speed out of it, you have to give up some of its rough-water ability and easier riding. It’s all a compromise. You can make a design do one thing well, but you usually have to give a little somewhere else.”
Construction Zone
Admittedly, making fiberglass boats can be a miserable job, but Baird found it to be really interesting. Building wind tunnels in the aircraft industry was probably a better gig, but Kenzie discovered that being self-employed was inherently fascinating; every problem in the place is your problem, especially the money-making part.
Working with chemicals, catalysts and resins — all flammable — is hazardous enough, but one often has to make do when starting a new venture. Sometimes luck is on your side. Baird thinks back, “When I first started, I had a primitive shop. Later on, I built some good buildings and was set up far better with spray booths and stuff like that. I was heating it with a wood stove, and sometimes I’d lay up a boat within 15 feet of that wood stove.”
Others weren’t as fortunate in beating the odds. “I had an employee one time that quit and started a little deal of his own,” Baird says. “He built a shop at home. He was going to build boats, and in a week, he burned it down. It went down so fast, he had trouble getting out of the place.”
Laying up a boat hull isn’t technologically difficult, but there are a couple of schools of thought on the best way to get it done. Large-volume manufacturers typically use pressurized sprayers to apply catalyzed resin to the fiberglass cloth, while smaller builders, such as Kenzie Baird, preferred to brush the resin on by hand. Either way, you’re working against the clock, because once you add catalyst to the resin, you have a rather short window of opportunity to put the resin where you want it before it solidifies.
Fish Boat to Bass Boat
The term “bass boat” wasn’t a common phrase in the mid-60s — you went fishing in a “fishing boat.” As the new fiberglassed boats became more popular, builders began adding features to their standard fishing boats to make them more suitable for the growing demand for “bass boats.”
Baird’s first boats were tiller steer. But as engine horsepower increased, he began installing consoles and cable steering. He also listened to his customers and did quite a bit of custom work — he would use the same basic hull, but with different interiors and options.
The last Kenzie Craft bass boat was 16 feet 6 inches long — a good deal wider — but basically the same type of hull design. Baird built a few other models. Some of them were of a slightly different hull design, but the modified round bottom was always the most successful and the best all-around fishing boat.
Current Opinion
Kenzie Baird officially retired in 1977, just when the bass boat phenomenon was gaining momentum. During our telephone interview, the subject of today’s bass boats came up. “My boats might not qualify for what they call a bass boat now because the bass boats of today are an attempt to make a fishing boat a speed boat,” was Baird’s take on the matter. “That’s not for me. It’s not the type of boat I like to fish in because I think they’ve made too much work out of it. They’re building what’ll sell, and obviously what the people want. I realize that I’m stuck in the 1940s.”
We asked Kenzie Baird if he missed being in the boat business, and he was quick to respond with a laugh. “Not much. I particularly don’t miss all that ground ‘glass in my socks.”
There’s no substitute for honesty and candor.
Allison Boats
When we think of a bass boat, we typically envision a modified V hull, with a pad bottom, and more often than not, an extended transom/built-in jackplate. Pretty cool stuff, right?
But have you ever wondered how these trick hull designs came to be? A lot of the credit for the performance of today’s bass boats goes to Paul Allison and his son, Darris Allison.
In the early 1950s, Paul Allison had a small auto body repair shop in rural Tennessee. In his spare time, he liked to fish and run informal boat races with his buddies. Allison’s hobby evolved into what’s become one of the foundations of modern bass boating: Allison Boats.
Darris Allison was eight years old in 1955 when his dad, Paul Allison, obtained an old wood boat that was rotted to the point that you could see all the way through the holes in the hull.
Paul disassembled the boat, salvaging as much as he could, including the hardware and every brass screw. Using the old pieces as templates, he rebuilt the 13-foot plywood boat. With a 25 hp Johnson outboard on it, that little boat scooted along at about 43 mph.
Speed Changes Things
As Paul Allison’s boat business grew, so did his interest in boat racing. In the late 1950s, Paul’s wooden race boats were nearly unbeatable. The Allisons were so fast, that the race organizers outlawed wood boats altogether, and declared that only fiberglass boats would be legal for competition.
Before giving up wood for good, Allison rigged his last wood boat with an 80 hp Mercury, and became the first pleasure boat to break 60 mph — an official record.
When Allison got the news he couldn’t race wood boats anymore, he immediately started on a fiberglass boat. His first fiberglass boat is still alive on the Allison Boats website, in the History section. It’s the white boat with a small Mercury driving towards the camera.
Always looking for more speed, Allison continued to experiment with bottom designs. His son, Darris, shares how the pad bottom came into being. “He took that flat bottom and ended up putting a ski on the bottom of it, and built a shallow V into it. They were wide pads with a shallow V — about a 15-degree V — that ran off and left the old, flat bottoms, and, by far, rode better in choppy water.”
In His Father’s Footsteps
Paul Allison’s boat business began catering to the growing boat racing fraternity, but young Darris wanted to forge ahead in his own direction—his vision leaned more toward fishing boats. So, at the tender age of 14, Darris started his own boat business, and had his first taste of the real world at fifteen — when he filed his first income tax return.
Darris tooled up a fishing deck mold for one of his dad’s old 13-foot, flat-bottom runabout molds around 1961. Keep in mind that there weren’t many “bass boats” around — they were known as plain ol’ fishing boats.
Darris’ Pad
Over time, Darris noticed the success of his dad’s pad-bottom hull designs, and decided to try the new bottom design on a fishing boat. He got the idea to take his father’s pad-bottom V hull — since it was the same shape as the 13-footer — and put his fishing deck on it.
Paul let Darris use the mold long enough to build a hull. The boat had a balsa core, so needless to say it was light. Darris put a fishing boat deck on it, and hung a manual start, short-shaft 50 hp Mercury on the back. He knew from his father’s racing experience that raising the engine up could give you more speed, so he built a little jackplate to make the transom a little taller in order to elevate the outboard a bit.
As he tells us about it, Darris is still proud of his project. “It was the first 13-foot pad V bottom fishing boat. That thing would fly with that little ol’ 50.”
And so it was: the first pad-bottom fishing boat and the first attempt at a jackplate — major turning points in the evolution of bass boats.
The Process of Continuous Improvement
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Darris Allison turned his creativity loose in his quest for the ultimate fishing machine, trying various transom setups and other refinements. Nothing magical: just hard work, and lots of trial and error.
Allison had a 17-foot bass boat with a 65 hp Mercury on it, and he was trying to get it to go faster. Thinking the problem through, he got the idea that if you set the engine back, the weight of the engine would be like a kid on a seesaw: as you push it down, it lifts the front of the boat up.
To set the engine back, Allison invented the offset jackplate, or setback jackplate. He tells us, “I built a steel box, because I had a welder. I couldn’t weld aluminum, but I could weld steel so I built the first one out of steel, and set that thing back there about a foot. It ran 62 mph. I about blew it over backwards with that 65 hp Mercury.”
Moving the engine back seemed to work, so Darris took the concept to the next level with his idea: Rather than a jackplate hanging off the back of the boat, why not offset the transom instead? He cut a notch in the bottom, moved the pad forward and the boat ran 3 mph /slower/. For some reason, it didn’t run or handle as good as before. Apparently, he’d lost the lift by making the pad shorter.
A failed experiment, for sure, but Allison learned that if he built the transom back as opposed to cutting the pad forward, the boat would run as well as if the engine were on a jackplate.
“I invented the setback transom, and it was known as a notched transom, where you notch the pad up under the back of the transom. It eventually became the setback transom, where you build the back of the boat, and set the transom back beyond the running surface. So that’s how that came about in the early ‘70s,” Allison recalls.
Hulluva Situation
Bass anglers are a stubborn breed, and once they get their minds set on something, you can’t dissuade them no matter how hard you try, or how wrong they might be. So, what do you do? Give the customers what they think they want, right?
The first Allison 16-foot bass boat had a deep V and a pad, similar to what we have now. This was during 1969 and 1970, but nobody wanted a V-bottom bass boat. Darris relates, “I had the fastest, smoothest bass boat in existence then, but they [the customers] wanted tri-hulls. It’s kind of disappointing because I didn’t want to back up.”
To keep the sales, Allison had to build what the market wanted. So, he put a tri-hull front end on the V-bottom boat, and called his creation a “tri-V” — a tri-hull front and a V-bottom back.
Because the tri-V was fast -- and because it still rode relatively good (although it wasn’t nearly as good as a true V bottom) -- and ran 10-20 mph faster than any of the other tri-hull boats, everybody wanted one.
Transom Transition
If you believe the ad copy in bass boat manufacturer’s brochures, you might be led to think that the “no wood” bass rig is a recent technological breakthrough. The truth is, it’s not.
Back in the mid-80s, Allison decided that he didn’t like the idea of customers spending their money on an Allison boat only to come back later with the transom rotted.
He came up with a composite—a structural aluminum frame with bosses welded in and stainless steel studs—and made a virtually indestructible, rot-proof transom. Allison used Klegecell throughout the hull and deck, and came out with the first all-composite, no-rot bass boat.
To appreciate how good today’s bass boats really are, we need to look back to the origins of the machines — not only as highly specialized fishing platforms, but also as an on-going testimony to the passionate efforts of the industry’s pioneers.
In telling this story, we’ve tried to interview the people who were involved in creating the earliest bass boats. For the most part, these first-person accounts are straightforward, but you may notice some inconsistencies in specific dates or details. Please be aware that time may fade or blur our memories.
Having said all that, we hope you enjoy reading these rare one-on-one conversations as much as we enjoyed conducting them.
Skeeter
In 1948, World War II was a recent memory, and the US economy was on an upswing with an average per capita income of nearly $1500 — an impressive figure for the times.
Columbia Records introduced the 33-1/3 rpm LP record, so now you could enjoy 25 minutes of uninterrupted music per side — compared to the 4 minutes on the 78 rpm discs that were the industry standard.
Anglers had their choice of traditional wood boats or the newer riveted aluminum hulls. Life was good.
A Better Boat
East Texas angler Holmes Thurmond usually is awarded the credit for building the first bass boat way back in 1948. Although Holmes is no longer with us, we tracked down his grandson, Butch Thurmond, who used to spend his summer vacations in the mid-50s with his grandfather.
Holmes Thurmond loved to fish the waters near his home, however, he didn’t like the flat bottom hulls that were popular at the time. Dissatisfied with the limited selection of fishing boats on the market, he decided to make his own small craft.
“On windy days, he [Holmes] got tired of getting pushed around in the old flat-bottom-type boats that would grab the wind. That was before the days of trolling motors,” Thurmond tells us. “He came up with a design that wouldn’t get pushed around by the wind as easily. If you look at pictures of the early Skeeters, you’ll see what I mean. They have inward-sloping sides.”
The bottom of the boat Holmes Thurmond designed was quite a bit wider than the enclosed sides. Seated in one, you almost felt like you were in a box. There was plenty of room because the rods and tackle would fit off to the sides of the boat, on the bottom or up under the sloping sides.
It was also extremely stable. While fishing with his grandfather, Butch would sit on the little front deck with a sculling paddle. The boat was just about impossible to turn over, because even if you stood on the sides you’d actually be standing towards the middle of the boat.
Thurmond tells us his grandfather was not only an avid bass angler, but also a pioneer, which explains a lot about the design of his early bass boat. Holmes Thurmond was one of the first bass anglers to target structure by finding the edges of the old creek channels running through the lake.
“While I was paddling him around, I used to be the depthfinder. I’d drop an old window sash weight [on a line] so we could find the exact edge of them [the bass]. Then, we’d anchor back and cast out toward them in the deep water. We’d work our little worms up the edge and catch some really nice bass. And anytime another boat would come our way, my grandfather would turn around real quick and we’d cast towards the shallows, so they wouldn’t catch onto his new secret.”
Low, sleek and narrow, Thurmond’s little wood boat developed quite a following. Like a sharp-nosed bug, the boat zipped around the lakes, and soon people nicknamed it the Mosquito, or "Skeeter," for short.
The Skeeters’ popularity got the attention of a larger company that wanted to streamline the boat building process with a new material called fiberglass.
Thurmond had boats built, and even sold a few for a while, but finally ended up selling the rights to build fiberglass replicas of them to a company in Texas. Today, Holmes Thurmond still receives credit for being the inventor of the bass boat, although he never reaped much in the way of monetary rewards for it.
“Who would’ve ever known how lucrative building bass boats would become?” Butch Thurmond asks rhetorically. “Now of course I wish my name was Skeeter Thurmond — Skeeter Yamaha Butch Thurmond.”
Kenzie Baird
Many consider northern Arkansas the heart of the bass boat industry, but for the casual tourist driving through, one can’t help but wonder: How did fiberglass boat building ever get started in the Middle of Nowhere?
The answer? Kenzie Baird and Kenzie Craft Boats. Kenzie Baird was working in the aircraft industry in California in the late 1940s, building wind tunnel models and messing around with the cutting-edge composite called fiberglass.
In San Diego, Baird made a few homemade boats for fun. He noticed that some of the local boating clubs began group projects to build a fiberglass boat for each member. Although the process of making the project boats was, as Baird puts it “the awfullest mess you’ve ever seen,” the concept of a fiberglass boat inspired him.
About the same time that Butch Thurmond was out fishing with his grandpa in 1955, Baird moved from San Diego to rural Arkansas and found his new boat company. The manmade lakes in northern Arkansas were fairly new in the mid-50s, and there was no shortage of labor, so in retrospect, Baird’s decision to settle in Arkansas was a smart move.
Eventually, several major players in the bass boat business followed Baird’s lead and opened their doors in Arkansas as well. Today, the northwest corner of Arkansas is home to some of the finest bass boat manufacturers in the country.
Although Baird’s experience in making composite aircraft assemblies gave him somewhat of an upper hand in the ‘glass boat business, he discovered that blazing a new trail can be a lonely feeling. “It was kind of tough sledding because nobody knew anything about fiberglass.” Baird recalls. “I remember I took some ‘glass boats to a boat show in Springfield [Missouri], and I was the only one in the boat show with a fiberglass boat. It was a new material that was completely unproven.”
Beneath the Surface
Hull designs are fascinating. What’s equally interesting is why a certain builder chooses one type of bottom over another. It’s amazing how the builders’ personal on-the-water experiences dictate what kind of boats they make.
Being from the West Coast and boating on the ocean, Baird favored hulls that were solid rough-water boats. That’s why most Kenzie Craft boats featured a modified round bottom with a pretty fair-sized keel on them.
Seemingly minor design changes can make a big difference. Baird relates, “In the small boat, I got more effective width and more static stability by putting in a spray rail, and the hull came up from the outside of the spray rail. It was just a jog in the hull that formed a spray rail and made the boat a lot wider as it went up.”
Even though boats now come to life on a computer screen instead of on a drafting table, Kenzie Baird’s words still ring true: “Boat design is all a compromise. If you‘re going to get maximum speed out of it, you have to give up some of its rough-water ability and easier riding. It’s all a compromise. You can make a design do one thing well, but you usually have to give a little somewhere else.”
Construction Zone
Admittedly, making fiberglass boats can be a miserable job, but Baird found it to be really interesting. Building wind tunnels in the aircraft industry was probably a better gig, but Kenzie discovered that being self-employed was inherently fascinating; every problem in the place is your problem, especially the money-making part.
Working with chemicals, catalysts and resins — all flammable — is hazardous enough, but one often has to make do when starting a new venture. Sometimes luck is on your side. Baird thinks back, “When I first started, I had a primitive shop. Later on, I built some good buildings and was set up far better with spray booths and stuff like that. I was heating it with a wood stove, and sometimes I’d lay up a boat within 15 feet of that wood stove.”
Others weren’t as fortunate in beating the odds. “I had an employee one time that quit and started a little deal of his own,” Baird says. “He built a shop at home. He was going to build boats, and in a week, he burned it down. It went down so fast, he had trouble getting out of the place.”
Laying up a boat hull isn’t technologically difficult, but there are a couple of schools of thought on the best way to get it done. Large-volume manufacturers typically use pressurized sprayers to apply catalyzed resin to the fiberglass cloth, while smaller builders, such as Kenzie Baird, preferred to brush the resin on by hand. Either way, you’re working against the clock, because once you add catalyst to the resin, you have a rather short window of opportunity to put the resin where you want it before it solidifies.
Fish Boat to Bass Boat
The term “bass boat” wasn’t a common phrase in the mid-60s — you went fishing in a “fishing boat.” As the new fiberglassed boats became more popular, builders began adding features to their standard fishing boats to make them more suitable for the growing demand for “bass boats.”
Baird’s first boats were tiller steer. But as engine horsepower increased, he began installing consoles and cable steering. He also listened to his customers and did quite a bit of custom work — he would use the same basic hull, but with different interiors and options.
The last Kenzie Craft bass boat was 16 feet 6 inches long — a good deal wider — but basically the same type of hull design. Baird built a few other models. Some of them were of a slightly different hull design, but the modified round bottom was always the most successful and the best all-around fishing boat.
Current Opinion
Kenzie Baird officially retired in 1977, just when the bass boat phenomenon was gaining momentum. During our telephone interview, the subject of today’s bass boats came up. “My boats might not qualify for what they call a bass boat now because the bass boats of today are an attempt to make a fishing boat a speed boat,” was Baird’s take on the matter. “That’s not for me. It’s not the type of boat I like to fish in because I think they’ve made too much work out of it. They’re building what’ll sell, and obviously what the people want. I realize that I’m stuck in the 1940s.”
We asked Kenzie Baird if he missed being in the boat business, and he was quick to respond with a laugh. “Not much. I particularly don’t miss all that ground ‘glass in my socks.”
There’s no substitute for honesty and candor.
Allison Boats
When we think of a bass boat, we typically envision a modified V hull, with a pad bottom, and more often than not, an extended transom/built-in jackplate. Pretty cool stuff, right?
But have you ever wondered how these trick hull designs came to be? A lot of the credit for the performance of today’s bass boats goes to Paul Allison and his son, Darris Allison.
In the early 1950s, Paul Allison had a small auto body repair shop in rural Tennessee. In his spare time, he liked to fish and run informal boat races with his buddies. Allison’s hobby evolved into what’s become one of the foundations of modern bass boating: Allison Boats.
Darris Allison was eight years old in 1955 when his dad, Paul Allison, obtained an old wood boat that was rotted to the point that you could see all the way through the holes in the hull.
Paul disassembled the boat, salvaging as much as he could, including the hardware and every brass screw. Using the old pieces as templates, he rebuilt the 13-foot plywood boat. With a 25 hp Johnson outboard on it, that little boat scooted along at about 43 mph.
Speed Changes Things
As Paul Allison’s boat business grew, so did his interest in boat racing. In the late 1950s, Paul’s wooden race boats were nearly unbeatable. The Allisons were so fast, that the race organizers outlawed wood boats altogether, and declared that only fiberglass boats would be legal for competition.
Before giving up wood for good, Allison rigged his last wood boat with an 80 hp Mercury, and became the first pleasure boat to break 60 mph — an official record.
When Allison got the news he couldn’t race wood boats anymore, he immediately started on a fiberglass boat. His first fiberglass boat is still alive on the Allison Boats website, in the History section. It’s the white boat with a small Mercury driving towards the camera.
Always looking for more speed, Allison continued to experiment with bottom designs. His son, Darris, shares how the pad bottom came into being. “He took that flat bottom and ended up putting a ski on the bottom of it, and built a shallow V into it. They were wide pads with a shallow V — about a 15-degree V — that ran off and left the old, flat bottoms, and, by far, rode better in choppy water.”
In His Father’s Footsteps
Paul Allison’s boat business began catering to the growing boat racing fraternity, but young Darris wanted to forge ahead in his own direction—his vision leaned more toward fishing boats. So, at the tender age of 14, Darris started his own boat business, and had his first taste of the real world at fifteen — when he filed his first income tax return.
Darris tooled up a fishing deck mold for one of his dad’s old 13-foot, flat-bottom runabout molds around 1961. Keep in mind that there weren’t many “bass boats” around — they were known as plain ol’ fishing boats.
Darris’ Pad
Over time, Darris noticed the success of his dad’s pad-bottom hull designs, and decided to try the new bottom design on a fishing boat. He got the idea to take his father’s pad-bottom V hull — since it was the same shape as the 13-footer — and put his fishing deck on it.
Paul let Darris use the mold long enough to build a hull. The boat had a balsa core, so needless to say it was light. Darris put a fishing boat deck on it, and hung a manual start, short-shaft 50 hp Mercury on the back. He knew from his father’s racing experience that raising the engine up could give you more speed, so he built a little jackplate to make the transom a little taller in order to elevate the outboard a bit.
As he tells us about it, Darris is still proud of his project. “It was the first 13-foot pad V bottom fishing boat. That thing would fly with that little ol’ 50.”
And so it was: the first pad-bottom fishing boat and the first attempt at a jackplate — major turning points in the evolution of bass boats.
The Process of Continuous Improvement
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Darris Allison turned his creativity loose in his quest for the ultimate fishing machine, trying various transom setups and other refinements. Nothing magical: just hard work, and lots of trial and error.
Allison had a 17-foot bass boat with a 65 hp Mercury on it, and he was trying to get it to go faster. Thinking the problem through, he got the idea that if you set the engine back, the weight of the engine would be like a kid on a seesaw: as you push it down, it lifts the front of the boat up.
To set the engine back, Allison invented the offset jackplate, or setback jackplate. He tells us, “I built a steel box, because I had a welder. I couldn’t weld aluminum, but I could weld steel so I built the first one out of steel, and set that thing back there about a foot. It ran 62 mph. I about blew it over backwards with that 65 hp Mercury.”
Moving the engine back seemed to work, so Darris took the concept to the next level with his idea: Rather than a jackplate hanging off the back of the boat, why not offset the transom instead? He cut a notch in the bottom, moved the pad forward and the boat ran 3 mph /slower/. For some reason, it didn’t run or handle as good as before. Apparently, he’d lost the lift by making the pad shorter.
A failed experiment, for sure, but Allison learned that if he built the transom back as opposed to cutting the pad forward, the boat would run as well as if the engine were on a jackplate.
“I invented the setback transom, and it was known as a notched transom, where you notch the pad up under the back of the transom. It eventually became the setback transom, where you build the back of the boat, and set the transom back beyond the running surface. So that’s how that came about in the early ‘70s,” Allison recalls.
Hulluva Situation
Bass anglers are a stubborn breed, and once they get their minds set on something, you can’t dissuade them no matter how hard you try, or how wrong they might be. So, what do you do? Give the customers what they think they want, right?
The first Allison 16-foot bass boat had a deep V and a pad, similar to what we have now. This was during 1969 and 1970, but nobody wanted a V-bottom bass boat. Darris relates, “I had the fastest, smoothest bass boat in existence then, but they [the customers] wanted tri-hulls. It’s kind of disappointing because I didn’t want to back up.”
To keep the sales, Allison had to build what the market wanted. So, he put a tri-hull front end on the V-bottom boat, and called his creation a “tri-V” — a tri-hull front and a V-bottom back.
Because the tri-V was fast -- and because it still rode relatively good (although it wasn’t nearly as good as a true V bottom) -- and ran 10-20 mph faster than any of the other tri-hull boats, everybody wanted one.
Transom Transition
If you believe the ad copy in bass boat manufacturer’s brochures, you might be led to think that the “no wood” bass rig is a recent technological breakthrough. The truth is, it’s not.
Back in the mid-80s, Allison decided that he didn’t like the idea of customers spending their money on an Allison boat only to come back later with the transom rotted.
He came up with a composite—a structural aluminum frame with bosses welded in and stainless steel studs—and made a virtually indestructible, rot-proof transom. Allison used Klegecell throughout the hull and deck, and came out with the first all-composite, no-rot bass boat.