I often get questions about a fairly old video that has been out there for several years now about a client who decided to put a rubber fuel bladder into the forward deck of his Calusa. Why did he do that? Are these skiffs light in the bow? Why was it just this one guy? Well, the short answer is absolutely not, the Calusa is not bow light at all, even with a big guy like myself on the platform. But the story does - unintentionally - demonstrate some really cool attributes of the Towee.
First, the owner in question is a friend so we say this with a smile, when he told us that he intended to mount a relatively huge 40hp Yamaha Four Stroke Jet on his skiff, we told him ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO THIS. Let's look at the numbers - the average 20 hp prop weighs around 115-125lbs and is mounted down on the transom. Even when our clients mount up a big piggy Mercury 25 jet, we're still only talking about 186 lbs for the manual start model - she's a big old heavy powerplant and she is mounted leveraged way up there on a jackplate but she does just fine. However, what we are talking about with this particular skiff is a huge 40 hp jet that weighs in at (off the top of my head here) 237 ish pounds and then add a really heavy jackplate and hardware that added an extra 30 pounds for a total of almost 270lbs. Oh yeah - add 6 gallons of fuel which brings us up to around 310 pounds all leveraged way up there on a jackplate THEN have a 200lb (or more) guide crawl up on the platform and the comment was " she feels a little light in the bow when Im poling without an angler up there". Well, yes, yes she will! This was so far out of our design envelope that we really advised strongly against it and even we didn't know what would happen. So yes, in this bizzare instance, that fuel bladder in the bow certainly helped to balance out the skiff a bit when there was no angler on the bow. The point here is that this entire story has nothing to do with how a Calusa Pro poles - unless you do something kinda crazy (sorry Jeff :) ) like stack 310lbs on the transom of a super light weight poling skiff that only weighs 298lbs to start with.
The cool thing about this story was that the skiff took it! I don't think the speed was great (obviously) but he worked out of that skiff for years and I believe trailered it out West for carp fishing several Summers. Think about those trailer loads that transom and hull felt on a rough road. That load would have straight up eventually torn the transom off the majority of $70,000 plus skiffs much less the micros. We are very proud of the transom that we build into our skiffs.
So that's the story behind the infamous ATL fuel cell video. We thought it would be a fun story that illustrates a valid point this morning. If you are ready for this kind of quality, durability, stability and performance in your next skiff, now is a great time to give us a call and find out where your Towee can take you.
Komentarze