The boston whaler has 75 years of history designing boats, here is a brief overview taken from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia-

Richard T Fisher was the designer of the original Boston Whaler. Fisher graduated from Harvard University in 1936 and majored in Philosophy. He was running an electric relay company, but he was interested in building small lightweight boats out of balsa wood. He designed a rowboat and got the materials to build it, but he never built it. Raymond Hunt, Richard Fisher’s friend, was a naval architect and was designing boats for a living. They formed the partnership that would design the first Boston Whaler. In 1954 Dick Fisher found a newly released product that was called polyurethane foam he immediately saw this foam as a potential boat building material. Fisher saw this foam as a “synthetic balsa wood”. The first boat that Fisher built with this foam as a base was a small dingy, that was inspired by the Alcort Sailfish. Fisher was very pleased with this new building materal that he showed it to Ray Hunt.

Ray Hunt was very impressed with the little boat, but he realized that a boat powered
by an outboard would sell better than a sailboat. Fisher decided to design the first boat after the Sea Sled design, which was built by Hickman in the 1920’s. Dick Fisher built a boat out of Styrofoam and epoxy. “It had two keels,” said Fisher, “one inverted V between the runners and an anti-skid, anti-trip chine.” Fisher tested the boat all that summer and thought it was “the greatest thing ever”. That fall, when Fisher started running the boat in the rough weather, a flaw was revealed. When the boat had a heavy load and was not planning, the cavity in the middle of the hull forced air into the water that was going into the prop. This caused the engine to run rougher because the engine was getting air with the water. Fisher brought his problem to Hickman, the original designer of the Sea Sled. Hickman was no help and thought his design needed no modifications. Fisher thought that he would have to “put some stuff on the bottom to move that airy water out the there.” He used a method of trial and error to fix the problem of airy water. He would lay fiberglass on the bottom of the hull at nine am and run the boat behind his house when the glass cured. If the design did not work, he would bring it back to his house and start over. This prototype boat began to have a slight V bottom and the two runners on the sides. Fisher then called Hunt to come over and look over the design changes. Hunt added his own design changes to the prototype; his changes included a third runner in the center of the hull. Fisher then built a copy of the prototype that would serve as a plug for the production mold. Fisher and Hunt took the boat on sea trials. One of these tests was to run the 13 foot boat from Cohasset Massachusetts to New Bedford and back, which is roughly 120 miles. During these sea trials, Fisher found another small flaw in the boats design, it was “wetter than hell.” “A lot wetter,” he said, “than the other boat had been.” The reason this boat rode wetter than the other boat was the nine inch sole that was throwing all the spray into the boat. Since they had already made a mold for the boat, the modified the mold by adding to the flat center and turning it into a V shape. When they built the boat from the modified hull mold, in 1956, it was the original Boston Whaler 13 hull. The boat that emerged from that original design was very stable and had great carrying capacity. These two features, along with the great performance and rough weather handling made it very desirable. Also since the Whaler was so light in weight compared to the other boats at the time, it could be propelled by lower horsepower engines.”