My methods are pretty clean but my hands are slow. Projectiles like Electro Bolt save like .3 seconds per hit, which adds up, but it's hard to get through the boat with them in a reasonable way. Honestly might just be worth it to bite the bullet on the ship because it looks like it's pretty consistent for zone 2 once you get some strength behind it. The 2nd issue is that you need a second skill that's strong enough for the 3rd enemy in some fights because you can only use 2 Electro Bolts. In this run I'm using Smash3 which is probably the go-to for a run that uses Electro Bolt in zone 1 as well. We will see. Apparently sub-8 is possible from people who have faster hands than I do, so we will just have to see.