trolling motor batteries

[coyotewhacker]

If I'm interpreting this right, there's a whole bunch of "round" guys with rapidly graying hair (or no hair at all) with failing memory inhabiting this board. With gas prices going up faster than a 15 year old boy on his first date, needing a starting battery may soon be a moot point.
We'll all be launching and using the trolling motor to get around. I'm trying to burn up the remainder of the gas in my boat so I can take the tank out and replace a couple of leaky livewell hoses. Refilling it afterwards is going to be painful!

[Wolfman]

Makes bank fishing look more appealing don't it?...lol
Gary you caught any cats lately? We got to go sometime.

[coyotewhacker]

Still takes $2 gas to get to the bank unless you ride in on a mountain bike. My mountain bike is re-geared with road gears and high pressure slicks, so it fer shure won't tow a bass boat behind it......

[Wolfman]

Motorcycles are supposed to be on the upswing again. Wonder how big a Hawg you'd have to have to pull a rig down the road?...lol

[fishin]

You could get one of them custom bikes with the 350's in em' to pull your boat.

[coyotewhacker]

In this case, the "hawg" would be sitting over the pedals and crank of a human powered mountain bike....and even with 21 speeds available, it won't pull my boat. Maybe an inflatable 8 foot tied to the seat post, but that's pretty hard on the boat bottom. Down in Springfield, when you come in from the east side on Sunshine, the scooter dealer is always busy moving out those little annoying things that will get you killed quicker than anything else on the road.
No driving test, no helmet, no instruction...just give the man your money, hop on, and take on Springfield traffic.

[Wolfman]

Darwinism at it's best, survival of the fittest. Problem is god watchs over fools and small children. Think that includes Bass tournament boats to...lol

[coyotewhacker]

I'm old enough to remember when the first Honda motorbikes started flitting around on streets, mixing it up with big American muscle cars. For some reason, a lot of the people on these little 50cc step-throughs and 90 cc "real" motorcycles thought that they were immune to the dangers of cutting in on a big car. Sure did weed out the defectives in the gene pool at the time....scooters are going to provide the same evolutionary tool for removing mental defectives.

[Wolfman]

With the price of gas expect to see a LOT more of the silly things. I think ive seen about a 500% upswing in them silly things on the road localy here in the last two weeks. $1.94 a gallon i really don't blame em.

[fishnxs]

Yeah and you don't want to cut thru back yards getting away from the cops in Marshfield either. Then damn clotheslines are the pits!

[Wolfman]

Sounds like you speak from experiance gary...lol Got to be smart enough to duck under a clothes line. The chain link fences with all their sharp clotheing grabbing stickups are'nt much fun either. paticularly if there's a concrete pad on the other side...lol

[coyotewhacker]

Somewhere in here there is a connection between trolling motor batteries and little buzzing scooters....but here is something back on the original subject: I just got tired of playing Chinese fire drill with the battery charger, so went to BPS last week to check out a new Minnkota 1020 onboard charging system. It was on sale for a hundred bucks, with rebates and gift certificates making the final price about $50. Instead of doing directly into the big store, I stopped in at the cheap store next door and immediately found a returned 2020 system (charges two batteries at once at ten amps per battery) for the same hundred bucks. It took all of five seconds to determine that this was a better deal for my situation. Hookup and installation is a breeze, and the bigger unit charges both my batteries (130 amp hour) in four to six hours. All I have to do is plug it in and go do something else. If I forget and leave it plugged in, it automatically cuts back to a trickle charge to maintain the batteries at peak charge indefinitely. I really like it. It's not the only brand out there, and I'm sure the others do just as good a job, but if you want to make life easier, this is one way to do it.

[Wolfman]

Was looking at a magazine the other day and they had something called a Gorilla Charger in it, actualy two types. Supposedly it ran from your vehicle to your boat and when you hooked up to go to the lake your vehicle would charge your batteries as you drove to the lake. One would top off your charge and the other would completely charge your battery in about 2 hours. Kinda pricey though.

[coyotewhacker]

That might be a nice thing to have if your batteries were not badly discharged, but when you start putting that kind of demand on your vehicle alternator trying to keep one topped off and two more drawing max amps, I would begin to get a little nervous about the vehicle electrical system.
An RV with a high capacity charging system might work pretty good, though. Use two buck gas in a big RV to pull your heavy bass boat so you don't have to plug a charger into the wall socket......duhhhh! My next boat is going to have a selenium gel coat that will convert sunlight into DC current and will constantly recharge the batteries as I fish. Yeah, that's the ticket. The whole damned boat will be one giant solar charger. On a real bright day, probably wouldn't even need to use the batteries...shouldn't cost more than 10-12K extra to do that.

[fishnxs]

Put the meter on the batteries and they all seem to check out ok. Went to BP and bought one of those quickie meters to check the charge on your batteries and it shows the t/m batteries as being good and the cranking battery being bad.