pchansen
New Member
Nothing scientific here but here is my initial impression of my new smart tabs:
We took the boat out on the Columbia river on Friday with full fuel, 4 adults, and 3 children. Initially I had two adults in the bow and every one else aft. I started off with full trim down (out drive) and we had very little bow rise on the initial acceleration and was now able to trim the outdrive up to about 1.6 to 3.2 from full down. Doing a top speed run yielded about a 1 mph gain (if that) and noticed the RPM's initially hit 4500 and then climbed to 4860. The river has a pretty strong current right now and I estimate (from memory) that the boat tops out at about 47MPH doing a pass both up stream and down stream and using GPS to calculate speed.
Pulling the power back a bit, I immediately noticed that the boat didn't want to come off it's plane. 3000 RPM was an almost perfect cruising speed with the trim set at about 1.6. We hit the wake larger boats and this is where I noticed the tabs really coming into play. Very stable and almost no porpoising of any kind.
When slowing to a stop, the bow no longer tends to rise. We just slow down. The boat was loaded down a bit more than usual so it's hard to tell how much of the increased stability was from the weight and how much came from the tabs themselves. I do know that I can now trim the out drive up a bit during cruise which gives me a bit more control versus having the trim all the way down almost all the time.
So to recap:
Better stability
Smoother ride
Maybe a slightly higher top speed. A little sluggish getting there though as I don't remember the boat "hanging" at 4500 RPM before. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, I just don't remember it. Still learning though- only have ten hours under my belt. I might try playing with some of the adjustments to see if I can't cure that.
We took the boat out on the Columbia river on Friday with full fuel, 4 adults, and 3 children. Initially I had two adults in the bow and every one else aft. I started off with full trim down (out drive) and we had very little bow rise on the initial acceleration and was now able to trim the outdrive up to about 1.6 to 3.2 from full down. Doing a top speed run yielded about a 1 mph gain (if that) and noticed the RPM's initially hit 4500 and then climbed to 4860. The river has a pretty strong current right now and I estimate (from memory) that the boat tops out at about 47MPH doing a pass both up stream and down stream and using GPS to calculate speed.
Pulling the power back a bit, I immediately noticed that the boat didn't want to come off it's plane. 3000 RPM was an almost perfect cruising speed with the trim set at about 1.6. We hit the wake larger boats and this is where I noticed the tabs really coming into play. Very stable and almost no porpoising of any kind.
When slowing to a stop, the bow no longer tends to rise. We just slow down. The boat was loaded down a bit more than usual so it's hard to tell how much of the increased stability was from the weight and how much came from the tabs themselves. I do know that I can now trim the out drive up a bit during cruise which gives me a bit more control versus having the trim all the way down almost all the time.
So to recap:
Better stability
Smoother ride
Maybe a slightly higher top speed. A little sluggish getting there though as I don't remember the boat "hanging" at 4500 RPM before. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, I just don't remember it. Still learning though- only have ten hours under my belt. I might try playing with some of the adjustments to see if I can't cure that.
