Quote:
Originally Posted by mrobertson
I have one of the late 80's Tracker Seacrafts and in those years the boat was rated for a 225 and had a 25" transom. Given those ratings, one would never think a 115 would be adequate or even acceptable.
Where i fish on the chesapeake bay, it's always choppy. A tight 2-3 bay chop can make it miserable in some boats.
I am running a yamaha 115 2 stroke with a stern lifting prop. With the light weight on the stern, i can hold plane at probably 14 - 15 mph (no tabs, no hydrofoil) with any load i have ever had on board. Makes it very nice when it's rough.
I cruise @ 27 mph 4200 RPM's. WOT gets me about 34 mph @ 5500 RPM's.
Everyone has their own opinion of rough. If it were me, and you live/fish where its rough most of the time i would be looking at 2 stroke engines in the 115 - 135 HP range and build it around low planing speeds. The hull needs to get up out of the water to be efficient. Hard to believe but i have passed by similar sized, and even bigger boats where the captain was working the throttle. I trim the engine all the way down and let her run along at 15 mph, the landing is soft and im not touching the throttle.
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Carl Moesly designed the 19/20' hulls in the mid 60's for the biggest outboards available at the time, the I-6 Merc and the V-4 OMC's, which were right around 100-110 hp and less than 300 lbs. It's a very efficient hull that rides best with the light motors it was designed for. Ran mine for over 30 years with a 1975 115 Evinrude that gave me about the same performance you're getting. It would plane at 12 mph with trim tabs and allow you to run thru 2' square waves common on the Bahama Bank very comfortably, SITTING DOWN! Averaged about 2.8 mpg on 6 trips to the Abaco's running with very heavy loads, including 65-80 gallons of gas, 35 of which was even in the main tank!
Modern 20' boats with 8' beams and heavy 4-stroke motors seem like they won't plane below about 20 mph, and they're evidently so inefficient that most folks today seem to think that any 20' boat that doesn't have at least 200 hp is seriously underpowered! All I can say is that it appears that modern boats still haven't caught up to where Moesly was over 50 years ago!