Re: Help me please!
Figuring out what you need is really pretty easy. First, how slow will your boat troll with the 50 at idle. You usually want a motor that will troll between 1.25mph and 2.5mph and to get that, figure 2lbs of thrust for every 100lbs of boat, motor and your average load. Bow mounts typically come in 45, 54 and 60" shafts but a transom mount might be a 30 on a 14'. I run a 55lb/54" MinnKota Powerdrive V2/iPilot on my 16' Jetcraft which is 1800lbs dry. My motor is a couple of hundred and then my own 225lbs and a couple of batteries and then the weight of the trolling motor. My little 60hp Merc 4 stroke with the Smart Craft troll controll holds me at 2.5mph at in-gear idle. The trolling motor covers from 0-2.5 easily. At 2.5mph I'm running at level 8 with 4 steps up remaining to cover me in light winds.
O.K. I gotta admit I'm feeling danged lucky I managed to nail it as well as I did this time. I missed badly on the other two motors and boats by being way over powered. Too big and you burn through batteries too fast so you keep getting bigger batteries and adding more weight and well,,, it just never seems to end. I run two Optimas in parallel but will be switching to a single Oddysee as soon as it arrives.
So now you know how to figure it, what type do you want? Bow mount has a zillion advantages over transom mounts. Transom mounts are really designed for boats that don't have a main motor. That's my opinion anyway. The bow mount pulls the boat and its much easier to steer. In fact I leave my main motor down and even in a moderate wind it stays straight. I have the iPilot system and feel like I died and went to heaven. It's a huge improvement over the original autopilot/copilot systems. I have the remote if I want to drive it manually but I've found that with the bow mount you can just point the motor straight up and then steer with the helm if you leave your main engin down.
The transom mounts tend to be lighter and some see them as more portable but I have my bow mount in a sliding mount and I can take it off any time I want just as fast as any transom mount.
