We took the boat out today to try out a new prop. The weather was great for a day on the lake. There were some clouds out and a little breeze blowin' so the heat wasn't too bad, but I think we all would have rather had our rods in the water than our hands in the tools. Mike and I met Rod at Cross Lake.

And what a little pitch change can do for your boat's performance!

The intention was to improve our top end speed without hurting our hole shot too much. Changing a prop isn't hard at all. As you can see in the pictures below. On our boat you take off a cotter key that holds a cap that locks the nut that holds the prop on the shaft in place. Take the nut off, and there is a spacer and a lock washer. Once those are all removed the prop slides right off. If you are lucky the new prop will slide right on and you just replace all of the parts and you are good to go. In our case that wasn't the way it was going to work. When Mike slid the new prop on and put the washer and spacer on he noticed that there was a space between the two. The new prop hub was not as deep as the old one so we had to use an adapter kit that had a different type of spacer, lucky for us Rod had the kit. The nut was snugged down, the new prop was installed and we were ready to go.

Once we got the boat in the water Mike took off to see how the new prop was going to do. He hit it hard just as if we were number one in a tournament of 100 trying to get to our hole first. The hole shot seemed to be a little slower but not to the point that either of us were worried about it. Once we were up to speed, Mike could really feel the difference that the new prop was going to make. The boat was much easier to handle and almost all of the chine was gone. Now the big test. Mike wanted me to drive while he rode with Rod so that he could take some pictures of the boat. Well for the first time since we have owned the boat I got it up to speed and over Mike's top speed. With only me in the boat there isn't much extra weight and pre-4 Blade I could never get the boat up to what I thought was full speed because of the chine. With the new prop on I got the boat up to almost 74 mph which is the greatest feeling...

I did have to take a few minutes to play with it. I guess it is a little of the kid in me, but I had to see how high I could get the nose as I raised the trim and slowly bounced the throttle. As you can see I got it up there quit a ways before I got a little nervous that I was going to hurt something and let it down. Over all I think we had a good trip. I think that the next prop that we will try out is a 25 pitch 3 blade and 4 blade to see what kind of difference they will make.

I have just touched on the basics and didn't get into great detail about all the little changes. If you have any questions or comments about the performance differences or any thoughts on improvements please drop me an email. Just click on my name below, it's that easy.

Laurie Cork