EARL BENTZ: From Tunnel Hulls to Triton
If we were to do some word association exercises, and I said “Earl Bent,” you’d probably say “Triton Boats” — and you’d be right — but go flipping through the annals of bass boat evolution over the past 40 years or so, you’re going to find Earl Bentz in the thick of it, way before Triton built its first boat.
Bentz began a very unglamorous marine industry apprenticeship in his uncle’s Charleston, South Carolina, boat repair shop during the steamy summer of 1966. As the low man in the shop’s short food chain, young Bentz gained hands-on experience repainting boat bottoms, fiberglassing hulls, and rigging boats — jobs no one else wanted to do.
Keep in mind that this was just the beginning of the bass-fishing craze, when changes happened before your very eyes. During his tenure at his uncle’s place, Bentz saw bass boats in their primitive infancy: crude, flat-bottom craft, including a lot of aluminum skiffs. The bass momentum was building, and in the late ’60s the first generation of “real” bass boats arrived on the scene.
“Then came the flat-bottom Skeeters, and the flat-bottom Rangers,” recounts Bentz. “They all pretty much looked alike. A lot of them had stick steering, some of them had side consoles. Stick steering boats were very popular on Santee Cooper, which was our big bass lake.
“They were rough riding, beat you to death in rough water, were wet, and didn’t go very fast, but we didn’t have engines that were very big back then. The average horsepower was probably 50 to 55 horsepower back in those days.”
The Effects of Horsepower
Meanwhile, Ray Scott lit the fuse of his B.A.S.S. tournament tour, and the outboard manufacturers cut loose monstrous engines of up to 150 horsepower, so speed — specifically top-end speed — became hugely important to anglers.
Unlike our current litigious society, the rules were a bit different back then: “In those early days, insurance companies would insure over-powered boats,” Bentz reminisces. “If a boat was rated for a 90, a lot of people would put a 150 on it. An inline-six, short-shaft 150 Mercury on a 15-foot boat was a pretty popular setup,” Bentz recalls.
Moving on to the dawn of the ‘70s, bass boats went from flat bottoms to pad-bottoms. Where’d the pads come from? They migrated from Paul Allison’s V-hull race boats in Tennessee. It should be noted that Earl Bentz started racing boats in 1968 — not V-hulls, but tunnel hulls.
From Tunnels to Vees
According to Bentz, the bass boat phenomenon went to taking a V-bottom Allison-style hull and putting sponsons on the front of the boat. People felt that you had to have a tri-hull in order for it to be stable in the water, because these boats were typically narrow-beamed, narrow at the waterline, with an 18- to 20-degree V at the transom, and rather tipsy.
“The downside to the sponsons on the front of the boat is it creates a tremendous amount of flat surface when you’re on plane,” Bentz explains. “In rough water, they’re pretty rough riding. It just creates a lot of flat frontal area to hit the waves.
“The tri-hull boats of the late 1960s and early ‘70s were very popular for runabouts. Well, they put sponsons — training wheels as I call ‘em — on the front of a bass boat. So, that became the boat of the day.”
Hydra-Sports
The time had come to leave his uncle’s dealership, and in 1975, Bentz went to work in the Research & Development department of Hydra-Sports Boats alongside Roark Summerford, a fellow boat racer who became a modified-V guru in his own right.
You already know what Bentz thinks of sponsons, so what do you suppose is going to happen when you turn a couple of gung-ho research zealots like Summerford and Bentz loose on a 17-foot boat?
“We took a chainsaw and cut the sponsons off a 17-foot Hydra,” Bentz says. “We actually widened the boat from chine to chine at the waterline to give it a little more in-rest stability. It [also] helped to widen the pad to carry a little more load.
We were looking for a way to make the boat smoother riding in rough water, and drier, and carry a load better, and still give that dead in the water [stability] without the sponsons — or training wheels — on the front of the boat.”
The V-6 Outboards Cometh
Although not quite ready for public consumption, Mercury was testing a production version of the V-6 engines that their factory teams (including Bentz) had been racing with great success.
Mercury was testing the V-6 prototypes on big, single-engine center consoles. Bentz told them that the offshore market’s one thing, but the people who will be buying the V-6s are going to be bass fishermen.
The Merc engineers were more than just a little skeptical, thinking that there was no way any bass guy was going to put this great, big, hulky outboard on an itty-bitty, low-profile bass boat. But, his prophecy rang true, and according to Bentz, Mercury released the V-6—and in the first 12 months of production, 80 percent of the V-6s Mercury built went on bass boats.
That takes us pretty well through the ’70s. The marine industry has embraced the deep-Vs, and those awful tri-hulls are finally a thing of the past.
Stratos Boats
Moving into the ’80s, Bentz asked himself, “What else can we do to these bass boats to make them more user-friendly?”
In the company he started, Stratos Boats, one of the first things he did (in 1983) was to eliminate the fuses and replace them with circuit breakers. The standard prior to 1983 was 10-gage trolling motor wiring, which was fine for the earlier motors, but the larger trolling motors needed more juice, and Stratos was the first company to use 6-gage trolling motor wiring as standard equipment.
Bentz continued to emphasize comfort and ease of performance as he introduced Triton in 1996. Even today, his focus remains on making the best boats possible.
We asked Bentz for his advice for the bass boat shopper, and his comments reflect his common-sense approach to the boat business. “I think if you look at fit and finish — unfortunately anybody can get a shiny finish — but typically, the fit will tell you about the construction on things that you can’t see,” he says.
“Of the major brands, there are no really bad boats out there today. They’re all pretty darn good; they’ve weathered the storm. Look for a brand that has name recognition, that’s been around for a while. Buy a brand that you have confidence in from a company that’s still going to be in business to service it five years from now. There’s been a lot of bass fishermen over the years that have been burned by companies that are no longer around today.”
We also asked Bentz his thoughts on what’s coming down the pike in the bass boat industry — factoring in the super motors: the very high horsepower outboards and the unbelievably heavy four-strokes.
“The performance bass market is still very much — in my opinion — a two-stroke market,” Bentz says. “I’m talking about the upper end: the 200, 225, 250 and 300 hp range. I say that because of the power-to-weight ratio. No one has come up with anything yet to beat a direct-injected two stroke. I don’t see that changing any time soon."
If we were to do some word association exercises, and I said “Earl Bent,” you’d probably say “Triton Boats” — and you’d be right — but go flipping through the annals of bass boat evolution over the past 40 years or so, you’re going to find Earl Bentz in the thick of it, way before Triton built its first boat.
Bentz began a very unglamorous marine industry apprenticeship in his uncle’s Charleston, South Carolina, boat repair shop during the steamy summer of 1966. As the low man in the shop’s short food chain, young Bentz gained hands-on experience repainting boat bottoms, fiberglassing hulls, and rigging boats — jobs no one else wanted to do.
Keep in mind that this was just the beginning of the bass-fishing craze, when changes happened before your very eyes. During his tenure at his uncle’s place, Bentz saw bass boats in their primitive infancy: crude, flat-bottom craft, including a lot of aluminum skiffs. The bass momentum was building, and in the late ’60s the first generation of “real” bass boats arrived on the scene.
“Then came the flat-bottom Skeeters, and the flat-bottom Rangers,” recounts Bentz. “They all pretty much looked alike. A lot of them had stick steering, some of them had side consoles. Stick steering boats were very popular on Santee Cooper, which was our big bass lake.
“They were rough riding, beat you to death in rough water, were wet, and didn’t go very fast, but we didn’t have engines that were very big back then. The average horsepower was probably 50 to 55 horsepower back in those days.”
The Effects of Horsepower
Meanwhile, Ray Scott lit the fuse of his B.A.S.S. tournament tour, and the outboard manufacturers cut loose monstrous engines of up to 150 horsepower, so speed — specifically top-end speed — became hugely important to anglers.
Unlike our current litigious society, the rules were a bit different back then: “In those early days, insurance companies would insure over-powered boats,” Bentz reminisces. “If a boat was rated for a 90, a lot of people would put a 150 on it. An inline-six, short-shaft 150 Mercury on a 15-foot boat was a pretty popular setup,” Bentz recalls.
Moving on to the dawn of the ‘70s, bass boats went from flat bottoms to pad-bottoms. Where’d the pads come from? They migrated from Paul Allison’s V-hull race boats in Tennessee. It should be noted that Earl Bentz started racing boats in 1968 — not V-hulls, but tunnel hulls.
From Tunnels to Vees
According to Bentz, the bass boat phenomenon went to taking a V-bottom Allison-style hull and putting sponsons on the front of the boat. People felt that you had to have a tri-hull in order for it to be stable in the water, because these boats were typically narrow-beamed, narrow at the waterline, with an 18- to 20-degree V at the transom, and rather tipsy.
“The downside to the sponsons on the front of the boat is it creates a tremendous amount of flat surface when you’re on plane,” Bentz explains. “In rough water, they’re pretty rough riding. It just creates a lot of flat frontal area to hit the waves.
“The tri-hull boats of the late 1960s and early ‘70s were very popular for runabouts. Well, they put sponsons — training wheels as I call ‘em — on the front of a bass boat. So, that became the boat of the day.”
Hydra-Sports
The time had come to leave his uncle’s dealership, and in 1975, Bentz went to work in the Research & Development department of Hydra-Sports Boats alongside Roark Summerford, a fellow boat racer who became a modified-V guru in his own right.
You already know what Bentz thinks of sponsons, so what do you suppose is going to happen when you turn a couple of gung-ho research zealots like Summerford and Bentz loose on a 17-foot boat?
“We took a chainsaw and cut the sponsons off a 17-foot Hydra,” Bentz says. “We actually widened the boat from chine to chine at the waterline to give it a little more in-rest stability. It [also] helped to widen the pad to carry a little more load.
We were looking for a way to make the boat smoother riding in rough water, and drier, and carry a load better, and still give that dead in the water [stability] without the sponsons — or training wheels — on the front of the boat.”
The V-6 Outboards Cometh
Although not quite ready for public consumption, Mercury was testing a production version of the V-6 engines that their factory teams (including Bentz) had been racing with great success.
Mercury was testing the V-6 prototypes on big, single-engine center consoles. Bentz told them that the offshore market’s one thing, but the people who will be buying the V-6s are going to be bass fishermen.
The Merc engineers were more than just a little skeptical, thinking that there was no way any bass guy was going to put this great, big, hulky outboard on an itty-bitty, low-profile bass boat. But, his prophecy rang true, and according to Bentz, Mercury released the V-6—and in the first 12 months of production, 80 percent of the V-6s Mercury built went on bass boats.
That takes us pretty well through the ’70s. The marine industry has embraced the deep-Vs, and those awful tri-hulls are finally a thing of the past.
Stratos Boats
Moving into the ’80s, Bentz asked himself, “What else can we do to these bass boats to make them more user-friendly?”
In the company he started, Stratos Boats, one of the first things he did (in 1983) was to eliminate the fuses and replace them with circuit breakers. The standard prior to 1983 was 10-gage trolling motor wiring, which was fine for the earlier motors, but the larger trolling motors needed more juice, and Stratos was the first company to use 6-gage trolling motor wiring as standard equipment.
Bentz continued to emphasize comfort and ease of performance as he introduced Triton in 1996. Even today, his focus remains on making the best boats possible.
We asked Bentz for his advice for the bass boat shopper, and his comments reflect his common-sense approach to the boat business. “I think if you look at fit and finish — unfortunately anybody can get a shiny finish — but typically, the fit will tell you about the construction on things that you can’t see,” he says.
“Of the major brands, there are no really bad boats out there today. They’re all pretty darn good; they’ve weathered the storm. Look for a brand that has name recognition, that’s been around for a while. Buy a brand that you have confidence in from a company that’s still going to be in business to service it five years from now. There’s been a lot of bass fishermen over the years that have been burned by companies that are no longer around today.”
We also asked Bentz his thoughts on what’s coming down the pike in the bass boat industry — factoring in the super motors: the very high horsepower outboards and the unbelievably heavy four-strokes.
“The performance bass market is still very much — in my opinion — a two-stroke market,” Bentz says. “I’m talking about the upper end: the 200, 225, 250 and 300 hp range. I say that because of the power-to-weight ratio. No one has come up with anything yet to beat a direct-injected two stroke. I don’t see that changing any time soon."