If the words “Fast, Handsome and Durable” weren’t written in the design brief, they were uppermost in the mind of Mark Ellis when he began to draw the lines of the Limestone 24 in the mid-1980s. Although it was the first powerboat design from his own drawing board, early in his career Ellis worked for John Deknatel at C. Ray Hunt Associates where he was inspired by Hunt’s deep-V hull concepts.
After leaving Hunt, he built his reputation with George Cuthbertson and George Cassian at Canada’s C&C Yachts in the early 1970s. Subsequently, he did design work from his own company, Mark Ellis Design, on the Aurora 40 and the Niagara 35. Ellis’ big breakthrough in production sailboats came when one of his sailing and racing friends, Gordon Fisher, urged him to design a 30-foot catboat, the Nonsuch 30, for which Fisher underwrote the plug-and-mold-making. To produce the design, Ellis turned to George Hinterhoeller, a well-respected Canadian boatbuilder who he would later also tap to build the Limestone 24.
Another of Ellis’ good friends, Fred Eaton, who was also a Ninsuch 30 owner, asked Ellis to design a cuddy-style boat that would handle the open waters of Georgian Bay. “[Fred] and a significant number of his friends wanted to buy one,” Ellis said, “so he funded the building of the tooling.” Hinterhoeller launched the Limestone prototype in the summer of 1985.
The Limestone 24 is a typical deep-V hull. The deadrise starts at about 55 degrees at the stem and then goes to a constant deadrise of about 22 degrees halfway down the boat’s waterline. Ellis used a radiused centerline rather than a sharp point, a feature he learned from Deknatel, which added significant structural and hydrodynamic properties.
Ellis included three pairs of lift strips that don’t run parallel to the water. “If you look at the lift strips in plan, you’ll see that they angle down as they go aft,” Ellis said. Some competitors incorrectly thought they were spray rails. “My boats were all wider,” he said, “with chines that were out of the water and above the waterline, which you can see in side views of moored boats.” Working together, the lift strips would keep the boat on plane down to about 16 knots.
Propulsion in the early models was a single 230-hp MerCruiser sterndrive, with a forward-mounted engine connected to the outdrive by a jackshaft, giving the 24 a top speed of close to 40 mph. The last Limestone 24 with a sterndrive was built about four years ago, by which time about 800 of the cuddy and express cruiser versions of the Limestone 24 had been built. Recently, Ellis worked with the new owners of the Limestone’s tooling to achieve their performance and handling goals for an outboard-powered version, but he still prefers keeping the weight of the motor somewhat forward of the transom to help minimize pitching and to optimize handling.
This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue.
