Hard Chine or round bilge?

   I'm redrawing some Canoe lines at the moment which some day will make to to the Canoe website, so I've got a variety of old documents scattered round the PC.

It used too be quite a big discussion point: this is a quote from an early 50s Yachting World I think:

Hard chine versus round bilge—how often have we argued the point, usually without getting very far? Before the war there were the jocular Coffin versus Chromium-plated Hearse (12 sq metre Sharpie v 14ft International) races at Itchenor and several other contests. They were great fun but so different were the types racing that they did little towards answering the old controversy.

Redrawing the old lines, which were of Eastwind, an Austin Farrar Canoe, very Uffa Fox influenced and pre-war looking, and of Conquest, an early hard chine Jack Holt design, I was struck by how very hard chine Conquest is, with no curvature in the sections at all, and how very rounded Eastwind was...

And it occurred to me that, in these days where we actually seem to have something approaching a consensus in mainstream deign, what we actually have is something in between, since although the typical contemporary boat has a single chine, the rest of the shape has curved sections, often as curved as anything that would have been seen on an old round bilge boat. So hard chine versus round bilge? Neither - or both.

Its funny how often that plays out, time and time again in history it seems that there must be a decision between x and y, but in the end, when the shouting has died down, the grand controversy just fizzles out...