We also thought about stowage. A 5.8m long, 2m wide RIB has about 1×4.4m =4.4m² of floor space inboard making the cylinder rack for kit storage a necessity and leaving very little room for moving about. Sitting on the tubes is the only way for people to be acomodated and this means only the cox’n can see ahead in many configurations.

By comparison a 1.8m wide DORY has a 1.5×4.2m = 6.3m² clear deck giving about 40% more space whilst being an overall smaller boat.

Hard sides means that climbing in over the gunnels is pretty tough so a DORY needs a ladder to enable simple diver recovery and that means stowage.

After some deliberations we decided to go ahead with the project and see what kind of boat we could get. Our aim was a dive platform that could be used inshore in support of shore based diving, and for some offshore sites ~6nm offshore.

We wanted

1. to get 6 divers plus a boathandler aboard with full kit,
2. to get something in excess of 15 knots to shorten journey times to about 30mins,
3. to have full dive capability to find sites with GPS and locate submerged objects with sonar,
4. to have a simple light ladder capable of being climbed with fins on,
5. to have a boat light enough to be carried on an unbraked trailer and towed by any car.

Some early concept drawings showing what we hoped to achieve and how the ladder and stowage would work are shown below. We planned to avoid a cylinder rack and store aqualungs on the floor beneath the seats. So far this has worked although we may well end up going for a cylinder rack as it frees up more space to kit up.