Just kidding. But I am astounded at the difference a propeller can make to boat performance. I’ve gone from laborious acceleration that took 10 or more seconds to get up on plane and running fast to a neck-snapping two seconds from a dead start to planning. More to the point, my Yamaha 90-horse engine can now turn up to its full-rated 5500 rpms. With the old propeller about all I could coax out of the engine was 4600 or so.

The slow acceleration really hadn’t bothered me simply because I didn’t think anything else was possible. My boat was slow to plane and so were my friends’ boats. But I never liked the idea the engine wouldn’t turn up to its full speed. Then I read that overtaxing an engine—i.e., running it wide open when it wasn’t able to reach its maximum rpms—wasn’t good for the engine.

When I had my Power Pole installed I asked Mike about the prop. He professes that he isn’t a prop expert—don’t believe him, he’s an expert on anything about flats boats—but did allow as how maybe my prop was too big. He told me to call Power Tech, a propeller manufacturer in Louisiana with a lot of experience with flats boats.

When I told Jeff at Power Tech that I wasn’t able to max out my Yamaha and that I was running a 13-inch diameter three-blade propeller with a 17-inch pitch, he immediately suggested that the prop was the problem. A Yamaha sitting on a light boat like mine would be much happier, he said, spinning a 13-inch propeller with a 15-inch pitch. And if I really wanted to launch the boat like a rocket ship from a dead start, a four-blade semi-cleaver propeller would do the trick. 

If you aren’t familiar with propellers, pitch is the angle of the blades and refers to how far the propeller would advance in one full turn through a solid medium in which no slippage would be possible. My old 17-inch pitch prop would move 17 inches forward with each revolution. A 15-inch prop would move just 15 inches forward. I had my doubts that a less aggressive propeller would give me better performance, so I deferred making the purchase and contented myself with going less-than-all-out when running from one fishing spot to another.

But finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and called Jeff back. Send it, I told him. Four days later the shiny new prop arrived and within an hour, it was on the boat and I was leaving the dock for a test run. You can only do idle speed through the canals and coves of our neighborhood, so it took about ten minutes to reach open water. That was just as well, it allowed the engine to warm up.

Then, with visions of $500 wasted, I shoved the throttle all the way forward. The engine noise was very different, a whine instead of a growl. The bow shot up briefly, then dropped back down and the boat gathered speed under me like a three-year-old colt coming out of the gate at Churchill Downs. Zip, I was ripping across the water with the engine purring at 5500 rpms.

The speedo on the Yamaha (not always the most reliable instrument on the boat) showed me clocking 37 knots, a couple of knots faster than with the old blade. When I maneuvered into a sharp turn, the propeller continued to grip the water unlike the old blade that cavitated on tight turns. I tried standing starts three more times to be sure it wasn’t some fluke before returning to the dock.