2021 Crestliner 1850 Sportfish, Merc 115, out of Erie. the capacity plate says 7 persons, and then under it 1,050 lbs persons and 1,400 lbs persons, motor and gear. a normal saturday for us is me, my wife, two teenage boys, my dad, a big cooler, a tube, four rods and a full tank.
my dad says the plate says seven so five is nothing. my wife has done the weight math in her head and won't tell me the answer, which i take as a bad sign. who's right?
the weight lines are the ones that matter, the person count is just what you get when you divide the weight by an average adult. and that average is lighter than most dads and most teenage boys these days, no offense to anyone at the cookout.
for monohulls under 20 feet the Coast Guard has a formula on the plate side of things, length times beam divided by 15 for the person count, and then the builder's weight numbers. the Coast Guard boating safety site, uscgboating.org, explains how the plate is figured. read it and then add up your real people, not the plate's people.
the stuff nobody weighs. a full tank of gas at about 6 pounds a gallon. trolling motor batteries, 60 some pounds each and you might have two or three. a cooler with 40 pounds of ice and drinks. an anchor and chain. water in the livewell if you've got it running, 8 pounds a gallon. a wet tube. on my Targa that came to almost 300 pounds before anybody stepped on board.
where you put it matters as much as how much. on Kentucky Lake when the wind's against the current you get a short steep chop, and a bow full of teenagers is how you take one over the front. heavy people toward the middle and back, cooler in the middle, and keep the bow seats for when it's flat. trim and the boat will thank you.
did it with a bathroom scale and a notepad, my wife supervising. people came to 1,010. the boys are bigger than i thought. gear and gas and batteries and the cooler came to another 290. so we're under the persons line by a hair and over the persons, motor and gear line once you add the 115 on the back.
so here's the rule now. dad comes when the lake is flat, and on northwest wind days we stay inside the bay at Presque Isle and leave the big cooler home. dad is fine with it, he says he just wanted somebody to do the math.
late, but this thread scared me straight. we watched a pontoon swamp off the Louisville waterfront on the 4th, fireworks crowd, 15 people and a cooler up front and a barge wake came through. nobody got hurt. i went home and read our plate for the first time in two years.
