The trim on your outboard is your best friend when you take on rough water. If you’re dealing with anything that can be described as “chop,” which means the waves are short and vertical—and you’re not looking up at them—you can probably safely soften the ride by trimming “in” or moving the lower unit closer to the transom, which will force the stern up, the bow down. This causes the sharper vee of the forward sections of the bottom into first contact with waves, splitting them and softening the ride. (Note that this does not work on boats with flat bottoms all the way to the bow—they only hammer harder.)
Run a difficult inlet close to the transom of a bigger boat; otherwise, ride the back of a wave.
You can also use trim tabs, if your boat has them, to perform the same function. And a plus with tabs is that you can put one up, one down, and thus raise the upwind side of the boat, giving yourself more freeboard on that side and hopefully reducing spray.
When things get truly rough varies greatly depending on your boat; two-footers are plenty rough in a 16-foot flats rig or a johnboat, while a 23-foot vee-bottom bayboat in competent hands might readily take on 4-foot seas. But whenever that line is crossed, trimming down the bow is the last thing you want to do. Anytime it appears there’s the slightest danger of a wave actually rolling over the bow, the strategy for safe operation reverses; now, you want to get the bow up by trimming out, pushing the stern down. And you’ll be slowing down to off-plane speeds, unless you want to go airborne on every crest. The idea is to give yourself as much freeboard as possible, and trimming the bow up does the job.
Entering an inlet, for example, is always time to go a bit bow-high. If you don’t, the boat may begin to “bow-steer,” which means that the forward sections of the bottom bite into the confused waves, throwing the bow first one way and then another despite what you do with the wheel. Or, you might eat a wave, simply running the bow downhill right into the front of a rolling greenie. Once the cockpit fills with water, the boat is probably going to turn over. And for those who can’t bear the thought of slowing down even in really risky conditions, there is the possibility of “pitch-poling,” in which the boat stuffs the bow into a wave and flips end over end. It happened a few years back to a flats boat operator on Tampa Bay—fortunately, he lived to tell about it, but some have not been so lucky.
One trick that helps a lot when you’re forced to deal with a difficult inlet is to get close to the transom of a big boat—a 60-footer is much better than a 25—and let them run interference for you. The mass of the big boat will flatten the confused waves and knock down a lot of the vertical stuff, leaving you mostly with the swells to deal with—not fun, but a lot better than if you are the lead sled dog. The deal is to get on the back of the second swell behind the big boat’s transom and hold yourself there, jockeying the throttle to maintain position so that you don’t slide back into the trough, and also so that you don’t go over the crest. And, of course, you have to keep a very sharp eye on the boat you’re following to make sure that he does not slow down suddenly.
Running a tough inlet on your own is much the same; you ride the back of a wave, just off plane. Make sure you don’t go over the crest, or your boat will become a surfboard racing down the other side. And if you slide back too far, the next wave may roll into the cockpit from behind. It can be dicey and it’s always exciting, but it works.
All of this said, there are some days when you will be a lot better off standing safely at the dock and wishing you were out there fishing than if you were out there fishing and wishing you were standing safely at the dock. The computer that sits atop your neck continues to be the greatest piece of boating safety gear you can possibly own. So boot it up and save your butt, or more.
