frozennortherner

While I don't know about renting opportunities I do know a lot about trolling motors in the event you decide to buy. First of all they are very low maintainence and if taken care of will last decades at the least. Second, forget about a $200 setup. If you get what you really need you can easily find yourself spending more than that on one battery alone. Any motor over 40 lb you are looking from $200 to the sky's the limit on the motor, while a cheap used motor can sometimes be had for pocket money you are likely to get more than you bargined for, typically something wrong with it that is dangerous, will cost more than buying brand new to properly repair, or both. These bargins are often worth exactly their weight in high grade aluminum. The motor need not be fancy or an especially large model, but you will need the right kind of battery, a good one and it has to be big. A good universal small boat motor is a 30 lb thrust minn kota. They share the same motor as the 35 and the continuous variable 40 and the earlier 50 lb models but are far cheaper. Wont plane anything, not even a small squareback canoe but it'l push a heavy runabout with 4 people and 120 pounds of batteries around faster than anyone can comfortably row until the cows' grandchildren come home. The heart of any electric vehicle (from a design standpoint these count) is not the motor but the battery. Small boats use deep cycle flooded lead acid batteries. They look like the battery in a truck but are different on the inside. Car batteries, known in the industry as starting batteries are good for starting engines and nothing else. They will give a brief burst of enormous power just fine but try to pull 20 to 50 amps from them for a solid hour or more and you will kill them in no time. Not all deep cycles are the same, a few brands are especially made to last. The big names for heavy duty batteries are Trojan and Deka. Trojans are very tough and are very friendly to deep discharge but need very frequent watering as they mostly don't have recombiners and have a lot of additives in the lead. Deka batteries will last 7 to 10 years in deep discharge service without pampering, don't need as frequent electrolyte maintence as Trojans, are so good at pumping out amps that they are pressed into service as starter batteries for large cars, and are made in the US of american mined metal. The main drawback is they are very heavy and need to be recharged without being used occasionally as they will self discharge as bad as a car battery. Neither of these should ever be a problem. Look for fine print saying "East Penn Battery company" These are the real ones. They tend to cause sticker shock but you get what you pay for. Life may be too short to drink cheap whine but life is too long to risk cheap boat batteries. Buy the biggest battery your boat can safely take the weight of and still cary its expected payload even if you do not use it for long distances. Firstly the further you drain a battery the fewer times you can recharge it. For deep cycle lead acid batteries if you draw 50% of its capacity each time you use it you get to use it roughly 800 times before it dies, for drawing until 85% empty it can be less than 300 times. Secondly due to a phenomenon called peukert losses a 100 amp hour battery will give not twice but almost three times the energy of a 50 amp hour battery when subject to a 30 amp load (about what a moderate size trolling motor uses) My personal reccomendation for trolling motors is get a 30 or 50 lb transom mount minn kota and invest in a group 31 size (group 27s hold just as much nowadays but sacrifices are made to cram that much energy in that little space) east penn build Deka deep cycle battery or better yet two of them to wire in parallel, and get the best charger you can get. Buy new, people tend to sell boat batteries when they are trying to evade the hazmat disposal fee on 50 pounds of useless lead with a gallon of sulfuric acid soaked into every crevice. Cheap chargers are just a transformer and a rectifier and will beat the living daylights out of even the best batteries, cutting their useful life by years. they also have a habit of making defective/damaged batteries explode. Get an industrial charger or a coast guard and UL or lloyds saltwater certified marine charger. For the cost of all this you can buy a gas outboard in good enough condition to start on half a pull without sputtering but you will get a safe, trouble free, comfortable, simple long lasting means of powering pretty much any small boat. Besides, if one were to write a comprehensive list of worse ways to blow one grand it wouldn't fit in a library.

When I tried to go from forum home to boat review and help firefox froze. I got a not responding message when I tried to exit the browser. the weird part was instead of a white "waiting" screen normally found between websites that are slow to load There were 3 copies of one image from an unrelated outside website; Aarinfantasy. the images were suitable for general consumption and there were no pop ups. The outside website in question is a discussion board, and although it has mature content it is not a malicious site, does not advertize other than by word of mouth and does not host advertizments that contain malware or generate popups. The website is not in my bookmarks and I have not "liked" it on facebook or elsewhere, nor was it open on my computer at the time. Ozark anglers forum was the only tab and only window open and I was going between the board index and the boat review board. this has only happened once at about 10:00 pm eastern time tonight and on restarting firefox ozark anglers worked without problems. Has anyone had transient problems with freezing and pictures from unrelated but nonmalicious websites. I dont know if it is on my end, your servers, or somewhere inbetween. my guess is on my end but if not I hope this is of some help

A girl wrote a christmas wish list that threatened to kill santa and all his reindeer if she didnt get the presents she wanted. It is right in the daily mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2073907/Christmas-list-Spoilt-girl-13-demands-presents-says-Santa-Claus-die.html

Yes I know it is old news but this kind of parenting cautionary tale bears repeating and a cursory search of the forum turned up nothing. A British teen was caught about to send a threatening letter to father christmas, the note demanded two famous pop singers in person and a smartphone among other items and said that santa and even his reindeer would be killed if she did not receive at least two of the items on her list. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...Claus-die.html You would think krampus would come down the chimney and get her, and caganer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caganer , http://sketchysantas.failblog.org/20...-of-christmas/ ) would fill her stocking, but no. Her mother is capitulating and trying her best to get the gifts for her spoiled bi**h of a daughter. This isn't even happening in admittedly mass consumerist America, this happened in Great Britain. She can stay over there for all I care, lord knows what would happen is she got loose in an american mall on Black Friday Sales.

How does it behave at high throttle settings? Does it nose up a lot when starting to plane or does it simply get faster and "levitate" like the atkin skiffs do when trimmed bow heavy. I read something in a prior post about the boat does not "rare (rear?) up at slow speeds" but I am unsure which speeds you are calling slow. any idea as to top speed, how is fuel economy? Does it steer easily at all speeds? Does it pole or row decently?

I saw an interesting method on tv once. Briefly boil and peel off the partially cooked meat from the bones. Then form them the meat into burger like patties, bread and fry (I forget if it was in a pan or deep fat). Have never tried this because no stores around here want fish with lots of bones taking up space. This could be a way of lessening the blow of the silver/Asian carp that seem to be everywhere in huge numbers. Easy to catch but easy to spook as far as I have been told. I have heard of expensive restraunts advertizing carp on tv. In some areas they are a delicacy and in many parts of Asia they actually have overfishing problems with them because so many people eat them. Perhaps we may be thinking of different carp than the rest of the posters though. Carp and catfish are popular as eating fish in new england because they have less toxins in their flesh. They owe this to eating plankton and little shards of plant matter hanging in the water instead of other animals, heeping them from being badly effected by biomagnification in the unsanitary rivers near industrial towns.

I haven't heard that much about it but the folding schooner is a plywood sharpie, 31 feet long 48? inch floor beam looks about 5 and a half feet. The designer claims 6 to 8 knots with 4 hp. Scantlings are startlingly tiny, they call for 1/4 inch marine ply. I would likely go with 3/4 inch doug fir mdo for a boat that big. Originally intended as a sailboat but could make for an easy to transport small motorboat. I would not try to race it cause it has to have as much aft rocker as a shawnee (haven't measured either), but trimmed right it probably will thumb its nose at hull speed limitations by getting lift from its midsection. I think I could go just about forever at 7+ knots with my 5 horse 4 stroke. My favorite river has an (oft ignored) 10 knot limit and if you want to go faster safely you will be stopping and going like city traffic b/c of the canoe rental place upstream and there is no need to ever go faster than the low teens. The most remarkable thing about this boat is that it has a sealed double bulkhead and an enormous hinge about amidships, that allows the whole thing to fold closed like a giant cell phone to enable it to ride on the same trailer as would be used by a 16 foot skiff, enabling the average driver with a normal car to tow it. plans are Here not sure how to downsize image, should be a small file for its pixel count due to compressability

perhaps we are daredevils up in MA but I have seen small jon boats (including mine) used on Nauset Marsh on Cape Cod, a saltwater marsh with just about nothing to block the wind and therefore chop. Some unwisely even leave them moored out there for weeks. The only time one ever swamped or sunk was when a 10 or 12 footer was left unattended at its mooring in a storm that we were unable to drive safely, much less boat in. the boat in question swamped partly from waves but in large part to three days of pouring rain, it remained upright.

Early this year somewhere between four million and 8 million disks were accidentally discharged into the Merrimack river from the municipal sewage treatment plant in Hookset NH. The environmental charity Clean River Project, their ranks filled with volunteers from the University of Massachusetts in Lowell under the guidance of the UMass Lowell Society of Environmental Scientists, went to work quickly. University administrators allowed volunteers to use the entire dock and staging area of the Bellegarde Boathouse to unload the disks and a disgusting variety of other litter from the recovery boats. Volunteers had previously placed shallow, wide nets to catch litter, and they went up in boats to pick it out with pool cleaning supplies. The results were impressive, capturing more than some had thought possible, but it was inevitable that a large amount evaded capture. These made it all the way to the Atlantic, where they were turning up as far north as Seabrook Beach NH, and were expected to make it south to the shores of cape cod bay, their expected final resting place. Government and industrial response was slow and poorly organized. It took longer than expected to get a reliable estimate on the number released and how contaminated the disks were. A local official claimed they were contaminated about the same level as normal littered garbage, and recommended using rubber or plastic gloves and properly washing hands before and after handling with hot soapy water. A beach on the merrimack was closed for weeks due to fears of children possibly contracting enterococcus. The river supplies most of Lowell's Drinking water needs. The treatment level is minimal. Boating this river I see a building labeled Lowell Regional Water Utility. It is smaller than most of the local houses, and likely contains little more than a strainer and a pump. Chlorine levels were not increased in response to this incident. On a trip to Scituate, Massachusetts this summer I saw a disk on shore. It had circumnavigated cape cod and stayed near shore.

Not sure what is wrong, i have seen similar rigs going nearly 20 per around where I am. Someone on craigslist a long while ago had a 12 footer and was selling his 7.5 after one use because he was scared of its speed. possibly relevant was my 4 hp johnson 2 stroke on a 10 foot jon boat once was little faster than my trolling motor and showed no symptoms of malfunction save slow speed and emptying its internal tank in under a mile, but with carb cleaner and careful adjustment of the needles it went at a very good clip. Does the motor smoke even after being warmed up or have any thing odd about it. Im sorry if I am underestimating your skills or knowledge, I'm sure you know what you are doing and I admit I don't have the full story. there just has to be something wrong with a 9.8 that won't plane a 12 footer it doesn't feel right. Also a flat bottom isnt needed for speed with a small motor. My 14 foot wagemaker wolverine is built like a battleship; cast ribs, big heavy castings at the corners, large overlapping seams with rivets in a zigzag, very thick skin, beam over 5 feet. With 2 men both over 200 lb, planed with an air cooled 5 horse I have proof here fast forward to 32 sec if you in a hurry and aren't interested in seeing blue herons. I'm the one holding the camera. the prior owner hinted there was something special about the motor, and I noticed it needs to warm up on half choke even in summer, if you remove choke too early it stalls, even if I didn't need to use the primer bulb at all. I have a slight suspicion it isn't a 5 horse anymore. Got it cheap off craiglist, $300 but i had to drive an hour each way and no warranty. But I'm not complaining, a souped up 4 stroke for 3 bills isn't something that happens everyday.

It seems a bit unrealistic in my opinion, I read the whole thing and it said the load was the driver, motor, fuel, and test and safety supplies. On the other hand there is the weight distribution issue slowing him down in the semi planing range. The 25 hp large displacement motor is heavy for a two stroke, and the man and likely also fuel are all in the back, not a good idea on a narrow rockered hull. I wonder how it would do with a 10 or 15 yamaha or tohatsu and someone up in the bow?

Piscator on the Playcraft river skiff (albeit only the 42"er): quote]The 15 HP 4 stroke Honda prop on the demo drove the hull onto plane easily in a couple of boat lengths or less. Top speed was surprisingly good The load was 3 people and a battery. are the shawnee 48"ers really that much slower? there is an extreme distinction between nowhere near planing and planing in less than twice a boat's own length and it doesn't make sense to me that an extra 4 inches of bottom width would be responsible for that difference. To reiterate my original questions: At what speed will a 10 or 15 prop motor push a heavily loaded river jon? how big are the speed differences between say a 42 and a 48 bottom? what about one with just 2 people aboard? How much rocker does a shawnee have. I use the term planing differently than normal powerboaters do, i simply mean any normal, sustained instance of traveling faster than hull speed other than plowing. a boat with a hull speed of say 5 knots traveling at 9 to 12 knots semiplaning on its midsection instead of the stern, but reasonably level and not throwing up a huge wake Would count under my standards, and in fact is the very behaviour I am seeking. An interesting story I once read (I forget where exactly) involved a smart little stunt in Louisiana involving a restored cypress Bateux and a girl on waterskis. Apparently the 24 footer dragged the (110 lb iirc) girl onto ski at 12 knots and without towing her could make 15. the engine in question was an 8 horse Nadler inboard from the 1920s. I find this surprising but believable because I have seen video of a very similar boat with the exact same make of engine planing long before full throttle.

I am planning on building a jon boat or possibly some other form of flat bottom boat and need more information on the speed, power requirements, and handling of long, moderately narrow beam, moderately rockered, flat bottom hard chine hulls in the lower semiplaning speed range. Does anyone have real numbers for how much aft rocker a Shawnee 2048 has. I have heard they will stay level at well above hull speed if there is a lot of weight in the bow. Many folks on the woodenboat forum insist even a small amount of aft rocker automatically results in a displacement hull, something I know there are exceptions to. with a heavy load (ie, 3 or 4 men, and some fishing gear and their catch) how fast will a shawnee 2048 go with say, a 9.9 or a 15. Will it always plow at moderate speeds or will outboard fins and keeping the bow weighted down cure this. I read about a mildly rockered skiff designed by Atkin, a slender 14+ footer that would plane 2 or 3 people with 4 hp. Operated normally it would nose up and porpoise if any attempt was made to go faster than hull speed, but trimmed level it would be hard to tell if you were planing or not without looking at the wake. It planed more like a sailboat, getting most of its lift from the middle instead of the stern, and would smoothly ease thru hull speed and "seem to levitate". The big question is if a rockered river jon can be made to do the same thing, and if a larger pointed bow skiff with a similar rocker profile to the large jon boats can be made to do the same. I see a lot of full planing hulls where I live, most of them very inefficient, and believe if more people knew more about true semidisplacement types it would make a lot of people happy. I am aware that most people who sightsee on local rivers like to go 7 to 12 knots, precisely the point at which most planing runabouts are at their least efficient, and even more importantly, throwing their biggest wakes and handling at their least safe. Up in the northeast, and probably most other areas as well a hull optimized from the beginning to handle well in this speed range is sorely needed and would be deeply appreciated. Unfortunately most people I have met are unaware of the shawnees, supremes, and playcrafts even existing, even those for whom just such a boat would be their best option. I intend to build a river jon or plywood motor sharpie someday (not this year; not enough money)because I want something larger than my 14 foot wagemaker utility boat for freshwater fishing, volunteer work, and sightseeing that will be simple and affordable to build and get good fuel economy. My favorite (read the one I best trust not to strand me) motor is an air cooled 5 horse outboard and my largest (read larger of my only 2 functioning motors) is an evinrude fastwin 18. Both were cheap craigslist deals, but work just as well as something triple their price at a marina. I intend to use the 5 horse for water quality sampling and freshwater fishing due its above water exhaust and low fuel use, and the big evinrude for sheltered harbors/salt marshes/etc or anywhere speed is of concern.

I have been reading this forum before and joined because I like talking, fishing and boating. I hail from Massachusetts, and am a student at the university of Massachusetts. This forum seems to be the place to go to discuss jon boats, so here I am. People up here are often surprised to learn my favorite eating fish is catfish. Apparently everyone is grossed out that they are bottom feeders who eat bass poo, but the same folks devour lobster who do the same thing. For sightseeing my favorite rivers are the Concord and its largest tributary the Assabet. Unfortunately no eating the fish here due to a huge mercury dumping in the 70s that makes fish unfit to eat to this day. Apparently some people dont read the warnings clearly posted on every boat ramp, and still eat out of it. For fishing the upper Merrimack is less polluted by chemicals, but is no longer beautiful due to mass development bass boats and reckless jet skiers. Many of them are under the false impression that a small, light planing hull in a crowded river with hunks of wood barely floating is just a harmless plaything and it costs lives. I am not just another rich yankee who is into conspicuous consumption, far from it both my boats are cheap craigslist finds and admittedly a bit ugly. But they are safe and get me to where I want to go and that is more important than brand names or bragging rights. My screen name choice of frozennortherner may be imperfect as there are other members who live in colder climates than mine. I borrowed the name from my account at gator boats forum. There is some truth to my screen name because the rivers have ice from shore to shore until late march and some of the kettle hole ponds are covered until april. On the plus side we have mild summers and almost no venomous snakes.