In the early days an aluminium boat or tinnie was about as much as that-a-piece of tin that floats.

During the past few decades though, competition between manufacturers has pushed tinnie technology to new heights.

In the next few months I'll be looking at advancements that have since made aluminium boats much more pleasurable to use and fish from.

For those readers around the country who are new to this topic let's first take a quick look back at tinnies in the 3.5 to 5 metre class.

Difficulty in forming aluminium in the shapes needed has, in the past, meant that aluminium boats were basically either a flat bottomed punt or the vee bottomed type.

A flat-bottomed punt has excellent stability at rest but drive into almost any chop and you end up looking like you're at an AC/DC concert.

Whether you enjoy this or not is one thing, what happens to your gear is another.

Fishing tackle, cameras, eskies and just about any thing else aboard has and will continue to be ruined by this harsh pounding.

Having a moderate V in a tinnie hull meant that aluminium boats could handle chop a fair bit better by cutting through it.

Sure they were still not as good as specially shaped fibreglass boats, but they were miles better than flat bottomed punts.

Problem was at rest, the smaller vee boats had low stability at rest, making it hard or even dangerous to move around in them.

All sorts of things in between have been made offering various tradeoffs between what both hulls offered.

That was until the Quintrex folks started forming aluminium with funky curves that offered the best of both worlds.

The first flared hull that was used on the Hornet Wildfisher models, around the 4 metre mark, became legend.

Suddenly there was an aluminium boat that was stable at rest but could cut also through chop with astonishing softness.

Those early models spawned a whole heap of bigger boats and gave Quintrex a massive lead in the market.