Cody Williams
Well-known member
Well, I finally got the new boat on the water this morning, and it was a blast! First off, once I was on the water I was really pleasantly surprised at how stable the BBIII is- I can walk all around the edges of the cockpit and sit on the side deck and she'll barely tip at all, and I weigh about 210 pounds so that makes me think that she'll handle a hunting load with no problems at all. It took a bit of playing around with moving the battery to the front but I got her trimmed to run really well with the surface drive motor-my buddy lent me his GPS unit and I ended up averaging about 12mph on the open water and got up to 13-14 mph on average in the shallows-funny thing about surface drives is that they actually run a bit faster in water less than 1' deep. Not blazing fast but not bad for a 13hp motor, she'll get me where I need to go to hunt. I was also really surprised at how well she handled the mud and shallows- If I had a bit of forward momentum I had no trouble at all running through two inches of water on top of a foot of mud, she cut through it like jello. I did get stuck on an almost dry mudbar but I was able to get going again by burying the prop in the mud and tractoring my way out, lots of fun! I am learning that surface drive motors are really sensitive to how they are trimmed, a single turn on the trim knob could equal a 1-2mph difference in speed depending on the water depth and how fast I was going when I made the adjustment. I can't wait to for the duck seasons to start now, I'll have to break her in a bit on fishing and bowfishing trips until October. I would like to thank everyone who chimed in with advice along the way, I'm so glad that I found this site, there is so much knowledge to be gained here!
