![]() You can save some gas by slowing down to the speed limit, and by making sure your tires-truck and trailer-are properly inflated. Tow Slower: If you tow your boat you're getting a double-whammy from escalating fuel prices. ![]() If it's been a few seasons since you've had the old gal in the shop for a spa treatment, find a good outboard tech and get her tuned up. But older two-stroke motors can benefit from being timed correctly, having the carbs properly adjusted, and being treated to a fresh set of spark plugs. Keep Her Tuned: There's not a lot of tune-up work you can do on a modern, fuel-injected outboard. If you keep your keep your boat in the water, clean the bottom regularly. Clean Your Hull: Marine growth on the boat bottom can cause a lot of drag. I've seen fishing boats that could lose 150 pounds in an hour, and it makes a difference. If you are carting around broken fishing gear, old bottles of sun screen, rusty tools, Uncle Wally's lucky slalom ski, and two extra anchors, you are also wasting gas. Put Your Boat on a Diet: Your boat is not a storage unit. When your speed over the water starts to go down, you've passed the most-efficient trim setting, and some boats take a lot less trim than others. You can use a hand-held GPS to watch your boat speed as you trim out the motor in small increments. Another sign of over-trimming is the sound of the prop breaking free of the water. If your boat starts to "porpoise," or bob up and down, you've over-trimmed. ![]() You go faster at the same throttle setting, and gain efficiency. On most boats, this will lift the bow, which reduces drag in the water. Trim It Out: Run as much trim as possible for the boat's speed. At $4.00 a gallon, a new prop might pay for itself this season. It's bad for efficiency and hard on the prop-shaft bearings. You're going wobble-wobble-wobble down the lake. Love Your Prop: Boating with a prop that has chewed-up blades is like driving a car with a wheel out of balance. Don't have a tachometer? Get an inexpensive shop tach at an auto-parts store and use it just for testing your prop. Or you can order a new hard copy from your dealer. Lost your manual? Merc and Yamaha have many manuals in PDF format on their websites. Don't know your motor's rpm range? Check your owner's manual, which probably also has some good advice on prop selection. If the prop is too large, the engine will be stuck below the minimum WOT rpm. If your prop is too small, the engine will over-rev. Propping is a subject for an entire column, or a book, but the short version is that you want your boat to be right in the middle of its wide-open throttle (WOT) rpm range at wide-open throttle. It's like trying to pedal a bike in the wrong gear - your legs are flying around but you're not getting anywhere. A boat that is under-propped might get right on plane, but then will require more rpm to run at cruising speed. Too much prop pitch can make it hard for the boat to get on plane, and this is when you are using the most gas, just plowing a hole in the water. Prop It Right: A prop that is too big or too small can really screw up fuel economy. This reminds me of the multi-engine custom go-fast boat I tested in Miami a few years back that had an analog fuel-flow meter with a face marked to report "dollars per hour." The owner could laugh because he could afford the gas. All I'm saying is that maybe you don't need to go 60 mph all day. Of course, at that engine speed I was zipping along at 59 mph, which is a lot more fun than 28 mph. At 4500 rpm, economy dropped by 30 percent, to 4.33 mpg, and it dropped by 60 percent to 3.82 mpg at 5500 rpm. Best economy was 6.13 mpg at 3000 rpm and about 28 mph. At the recent Yamaha media intro, for example, I ran a Skeeter SL 210 powered by the 225-hp F225TLR four-stroke. This is usually about the engine speed required to get the boat smartly on plane, but not much faster. Here are some ideas to consider: Throttle Back: Almost every outboard-powered boat I've tested over 20 years of crunching fuel-flow data has an economy "sweet spot" between 30 rpm. With that dubious record in mind, it would pay to make sure we are squeezing the most outboarding fun out of every ounce of go-juice. An expert on the radio today said that, adjusted for inflation, we still have not surpassed the peak price for gas, which was posted in 1981. As gas approaches $4.00 per gallon, even owners of small runabouts are looking at a $150 bill for a fill-up. High gas prices took some of the fun out of the Memorial Day weekend, which marks the beginning of the pleasure-boating season here in the Midwest. As gas prices soar, even this little can can cost a boater $24 to fill.
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