Giving Up the Gas

[CaddmannQ]

Well I took the boat out fishing again Saturday with my buddy Bobby. I managed to get two bass and he got 6 bluegill, but they were all small and we tossed them back.

It was the most perfect day for fishing ever. Calm and sunny with a slight overcast and not as hot. As we're going across the lake we can see hundreds of carp rolling in the shallows. At one point we had to cut through a narrow choke, and plowed the boat across 300 breeding carp, who are slapping the boat & jumping out of the water.

The boat ran terrific with the new motor, and the new 3-blade Kipawa propeller provides a noticeable boost to the top speed, plus it accelerates faster than the old one as well.


Unfortunately we took on about 4 gallons of water in the flotation chambers, and I discovered that there is a small crack in the transom where the boat had been sanded too thin during repainting. It's not a major job to patch, so I should have the boat back out again next week.

The lakes are starting to calm down, and fishing is improving.

Here is the Kipawa Power Prop, compared to the Minn Kota Weedless Wedge 2 prop. You can see that it is a much more aggressive prop, but on my small boat I feel this motor could turn an even larger one.


While the MinnKota prop seems to be quite a big prop, most of the surface is close to the hub and it doesn't count for much as far as propulsion.

The Kipawa puts more surface far from The Hub. Any surface twice as far from The Hub can be four times as effective, all else being the same.

But it's not the same. In the side view you can see that the power prop is a steeper pitch and screws through the water more aggressively. The part next to the hub is very aggressive making it worth more than it would seem from the back view.


And then there's the third blade! Any how it works and we clearly picked up nearly one knot on calm water. That's a speed increase of about 25% for under $50 including tax and shipping. My only complaint is that the new prop had a little bit of casting Flash. I spent some time carefully dressing and sharpening it before I put it on the motor.

Where's the crack? There's two of them at the heel of my transom. If you see the fiberglass threads where the paint is scuffed off you will realize this is a close up shot. The cracks are each 1 inch long

 

[CaddmannQ]

A few more photos from fishing Saturday, at the headwaters of Hensley Lake.


That's my fishin' & shootin' buddy Bobby.

 

[CaddmannQ]

At Hensley, those ripples in the water 50 yards dead ahead in the picture below are a huge School of golden carp, spawning.
In the post above you see my trolling gear, but we saw no trolling action; while trout were jumping out of the water all around after mosquitoes.

Look at the difference in scenery between low-lying Hensley Lake (550') above, and below, Huntington Lake (7000') last week.



I've hoisted the boat off the trailer and positioned it so now I can work on the crack.


I opened the crack up some last night, and there is wet sand and rotting plywood. I need to open it out some more and let it dry up a bit before I start patching.

I may do a better clean out & a plastic epoxy injection repair on this transom, but it has actually been completely solid because of the steel tubing I had put in it to support the 40 horse motor. Also since I dropped the 40 horsepower motor, the transom strength is not nearly so important.

But it must not leak!

 

[CaddmannQ]

I ground out the cracks in my boat yesterday, to substantial, patchable holes; and got behind them into the transom to remove the rotten red cedar which has been waterlogged. I hooked up a Shop-Vac to one of the holes and let it suck air through the transom to dry it.

Most of this boat has a double bottom, and evidently it communicates with the transom. That means of course that any water in the flotation Chambers causes transom rot. This construction method is one of the things that marks this as a cheap boat.

I think this has been seeping for the last 3 trips, as I had seen some minor dripping; but this last trip I drained about 4 gallons of water out of the flotation Chambers. surely this transom has leaked and been patched before I bought the boat in the year 2000

 

[CaddmannQ]

Just two tiny 1 inch long cracks. . .

But these things are always worse than they look from the outside. I managed to take on 5 gallons of water in 4hrs through these the last time we went out, and it all stayed in the flotation chamber.

This is actually the site of a previous repair finally gone bad after many years. This was patched before I bought the boat in 2000. Basically someone had injected epoxy into a crack to seal it, and the crack eventually propagated on both sides of their repair.

Once it was ground out this is what I had:

I opened up the cracks quite large because as it turns out there was some very thin fiberglass in this region. Someone had over-sanded the hull.

To get to the back I opened up a 4 by 8 inch hole in the top of the flotation chamber. Here you see it after resealing with layers of fiberglass but before paint.
This is what the inside look like after I removed most of the rotten plywood. This is in pretty good shape for a 40 year old boat. It's because they used red cedar and it doesn't rot quickly.

Here it is after removing all of the rotten plywood & dirt, and laying 5 coats of new fiberglass cloth and epoxy from the inside.

I just patched the whole area of the transom I could access about 12" long) to reinforce it because the fiberglass wasn't very thick in the region of the old patch due to over-sanding. I did not bother to replace the small amount of plywood removed. I did dig out as much of the damaged plywood as I possibly could without opening up further areas of the transom. Eventually I will address those as well; because failing to do so will just cause blisters from the inside of the boat.

Anyhow here it is after patching, and filling with epoxy putty, sanding and painting:

 

[CaddmannQ]

About 13 years ago my wife's dog chewed the tail light wires off my boat trailer and my utility trailer and the wires off of the transducer to my fish finder. I fixed it at the time, but that repair has finally given way because incompatibility between epoxies that I used & the ones the factory used. This caused the wires to fail right at the epoxy.



So I bought a new and much advanced fish finder and Counting for inflation it actually cost much less than the old one.

Out with the old in with the new:

The new one on the left has over twice as large a screen. The display resolution is much better as are the capabilities of the new 3D sonar. The old image was 128x128 pixels, and looked something like this:

The new one is a much different animal but I was surprised that it is still only 480 x 800 resolution. It's possible that a higher-resolution makes no sense due to granularity of the sonar itself.

The new transducer has a strain relief right where the wires on the old one broke, so I was pleased to see they had addressed this issue.

Having a transducer on the transom caused too much interference from the trolling motor, and in shallow water most of our picture was what we had already passed over. Also it was difficult to find a good location on the transom because of the trailer bunks and the size of the boat.

With this in mind I fabricated a new mount and attached the transducer at the front of the boat.

I made the U clamps myself and the rubber bushings are for the sway bar on a 67 Nova. They clamp it well enough that you cannot pull it loose from the boat, yet the substantial leverage allows you to easily rotate it out of the boat and place it in the water. It is here in the stowed position:

And here it is deployed:




It was my intention to run the wire inside the Steel tube, but unfortunately the plug on the end is too large to fit through and I just didn't want to splice it. I just taped it up as neatly as I could for now. After the tape gets icky I will take it off clean up everything, cut the wire and splice it, assuming this works out as well as I'm hoping.

 

[John A.]

Why didn't you mount the transducer straight to the boat?

Another option is a fat water pipe clamp so you can put it on the bottom of your front trolling motor

 

[CaddmannQ]

When I had the transducer of the old fish finder on the transom there was interference from the trolling motor.

The book said to put them min 15" apart, but with this one horsepower trolling motor that's not nearly enough.

Anyhow I put it at the very corner of the transom & it is still only two feet, and there is much turbulence about the transducer.

Evidently you can buy a transducer which clamps to trolling motor, so evidently they figured out how to avoid all that interference. This one didn't say anything about that in the instructions, other than you can buy one which clamps to the motor.

I noticed that this fish finder has a ferrite core or a choke on the power lead. I think this is intended to reduce interference from Motors and other electric devices.

You can also buy a transducer which glues right to the inner hull, but since my boat has a double bottom the only single hold place to put it is inside the flotation chamber.

 

[CaddmannQ]

Well I've got the boat hooked up and wife is getting dressed and we're on our way to go fishing.

 

[CaddmannQ]

Well my new transducer deployment system works very well but I had a different problem with the unit. I was getting electrical noise from that big trolling motor and the manual mentioned that this might happen.

Evidently the Cure is to have an isolated 12v battery just for the fish finder.

We had a terrific time out on the lake today and the weather was just beautiful in fact it was a perfect day for boating but a lousy day for fishing.

On the other hand we saw hundreds of golden carp having fish orgies in the shallow water.

Here is the boat all rigged out for traveling.