While someone might use the term " surface piercing prop", I believe they may be refering to the cleaver type prop that you typically see on surface drive hydroplanes. They tend to have more lift than a more conventional prop. With the models for example, an Octura V967 cleaver style prop gives tremendous lift compared to a 1667. On mono hulls you have a choice of sub surface or surface drive. The key factor to use surface drive is that the boat can settle into the water and you have better control of the boat. When you have better control, you can go faster. On both mono hulls and hydros you can use the transom to ventilate the prop during launch thus being able to swing a larger prop when you use the surface drive system. With a hydro that takes a shoe just in front of the prop like on the Eagle sg. I have used a deep vee bottom on my outriggers to do the same thing. You might ask why put a vee on a rigger to ventilate the prop? Well, in the dead of summer when there is a low air density situation, many guys have to lengthen their tuned pipes to get the boats launched. If you have a method to ventilate the prop till the boat gets up to speed you can keep the shorter pipe length and go faster than the other guys. So, ventilating the surface drive props to swing larger props makes sense. I have found that all my props work sub surface and surface. It's just a matter of which one provides the right amount of pitch and lift to make the particular boat have the perfect ride. Sometimes the three blade prop gives smoother cornering because they have a bit more lift and keep the transom from falling while the model is cornering. So, you have to look at the whole picture when it comes to a surface drive setup.
Better to talk John Finch He love story about mono 
