"Green" Boats: The Flats Canoe

Long, narrow-beam flats boats have some big advantages over their wider cousins: they get up on plane quickly, pole like a dream, and tend to use a lot less fuel, making them perfect for long trips. Tim Chapman writes about one of these new hybrids, a custom 23-footer, in the Miami Herald. “On one trip, two guys in a high-end flats boat powered with 150 horsepower outboards stared, then smiled, as they passed the long, strange craft. They headed around an island to fish a flat in about two feet of water. Meanwhile, Gorton cut the power to his ‘Seminole” canoe and started poling in about six inches of water. You can easily guess who landed the better catches — it wasn’t the guys with the big horsepower.”