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We plan to use our 1987--17 Montauk 90 Honda as our tender. Will the bow Eye be strong enough or should I have a custom SS towing strap made up an installed.
Many of our tows will be 50-80 miles in open ocean from Florida to the Bahamas. I intend to tow her in the 20-25 knot range. I will use a 150' 5/8" line from a bridle off the larger boats stern cleats

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bobhil,

Here is a write up I did about towing our old Montauk...

My father and I spent a good 2 days laying out and testing our bridal set up. We wanted to tow our Montauk around on our 10 day family vacation on Lake Erie and use it to tool around the islands down there. Our bridal consisted of heavy weight floating yellow nylon line. The line has a good stretch to it and helped with absorbing jarring shocks. We had two ropes coming from the stern of the tow vessel to a single tow line that was 50+ feet behind the tow vessel. Then with me in the whaler and my father and my friend in the Wellcraft we began testing lengths of the tow line, speeds, and motor up or down. This took a couple hours of testing and we found that the motor must be up, and if the tow line was to long or to short the whaler would wonder back and forth in the tow vessels wake. We found that a length of 100’ of tow line was just right (50’ back of bridal and 100’ tow line putting the whaler a total of 150’ behind the tow vessel). We also found that the higher from the water line the tow lines attached to the stern of the tow vessel the better. Also the lower to the water line the tow line attached to the towed vessel the better as well. With this set up we could cruise at 25 maybe 27mph with the whaler tracking straight behind the tow vessel. With twin 454 big blocks in the Wellcraft you never knew the whaler was behind you.

Now the time can for vacation. My father brought the Wellcraft down from Port Huron to our family friend’s house on Grosse Isle where I trailered the Montauk to. The next morning was so nice my bother and I decided to drive the Montauk across Lake Erie to Sandusky. That was a fun ride across the lake! So, no towing that day. But every where else we went we towed the Montauk with us. It towed great however, you would have to back down and stop to unhook the whaler and have someone drive it in when entering port. So long as we could tie the whaler up to the stern of our boat we never had to pay to dock it anywhere. We went from Sandusky to Kellys Island to Put-in-Bay and back to Grosse Isle where my brother trailered the whaler home and I drove the Wellcraft back to Port Huron. It was great having the second boat with us to go island hoping. Out of all the 20 plus years of family trips on our boats, this was my favorite by far!

[img]http://www.whalercentral.com/forum/attachments/TowingMontauk2%5B163%5D.jpg[/img]

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I frequently tow a tender behind my Sedan Bridge as fast as 25 knots and have found that Mighty Tow (www.ropeinc.com/towline.html) makes a great product, it works much better than the home made rig I used before. You can get a custom tow eye from Broward Machine (toweye.com) but the Whaler is problematic because of the hull design. I am having a SS plate being made right now by Superior Metal Fabricators in Orlando that will fit under the lift eye on the inside of the bow of my 15' SS and spread the load over about a square foot, unfortuneatly the piece has to be made to order to fit around the Norman Pin support and bent to conform to the inner liner shape.
Also if you don't reinforce the bow tow eye on the outside (I am using a SS oval piece about 3" Long by 2" wide behind a SS bow eye) the upward lift of the harness (at least on the 15) could drive the top of the eye into the hull if there is enough force (water in tender for example) if you get in a little weather or moderate seas offshore. Just my 2 cents.;)