The Stingher 10m has one horsepower for every 1.4 cm of its considerable length. If a six-foot man were so blessed, he would possess no fewer than 260hp. Nice thought. Alex Smith reports.

I remember travelling to Plymouth to carry out a mid-winter review of an open boat. At nine in the morning, it sat at the pontoon, cloaked in a bedrock of frost. Not once did the needle lift above zero that day and, as we soldiered on with dampened faces at far too many knots for comfort, I felt my skin burning with the cold. I still recall how my face took on a strawberry sunbed complexion and my lips, pillaged of moisture and cut through by the wind, shrivelled up like strips of ageing beef.

So when Ed Pedley, Director of MRL, called me up with a mid-winter invitation to test an open ten-metre RIB, I anticipated pain. And when he told me that all 700 of its horsepower were conjured into being by a pair of Verado’s flagship 350Sci supercharged outboard engines, rigged with painstaking care and tested to the most perfect expression of their potency by none other than seven-times world champion, Neil Holmes, I knew it was going to be monumentally rapid. But this time I was prepared. With a quart of Factor 30 massaged into my face and lips swimming in virgin seal fat, I made my way down to Drivers Wharf to take a look . . .

Sitting on the dock

Notwithstanding the promise of the prodigious Mercury twin rig, the ten-metre Stingher is actually a rather unassuming boat to look at. You get a broad, open deck with a two-man console in the middle, plus a long, elevated bow space with plenty of potential for sun bathing, storage and communal entertaining. In the forward-most V of the bow, the level is raised further to accommodate the anchor locker and topped off at the peak with a hard nose at the apex of the large-diameter tubes.

It’s worth noting however that, even with a fat, traditional, workmanlike collar, the internal beam measures more than seven feet at its widest point. That’s enormous for a ten-metre RIB and although the need for a relatively fine entry means that this width cannot be carried very far forward, it does create a great deal more room than the average ribster would expect.

Singing in tune

By European standards, 700 horsepower on a ten-metre leisure boat seems like a hell of a lot. And given the fact that there is no cabin to add a little extra weight and dumb down the nose, it seems even more excessive. But when you get underway, it doesn’t feel in the slightest bit overpowered and that has a great deal to do with the tuning process.

For more, see the March 2010 issue of Sports Boat and RIB magazine . . .