i am in the prosses of building a 16 foot center counsle boat strictly for fishing my goal is 25 to 30 mph at full throttle with a cofortable cruise speed and exelent trolling cararctoristics my hull weight will be around 600 lbs with out any rigging it will have extensive fishing rigging including 2 live wells holding 75 gallons of water combined fuel tank i am still doing homework on depending on engine i use i have been looking for a small diesel engine to power the boat for a few reasons reliability low fuel consumption. i am reserching a surface drive for the boat for shallow water fishing as well as increased fuel economy and performance my questions are as follows is using a surface drive a good idea with a small beta engine? whitch beta engine should i use to get the speed i want ? (i am willing to sacrifice a little speed for a weight savings) and if you can recomend a motor i am looking for fuel consumption rates ,transmission recomondation, also price and availibility, and maby some final drive recomndations all input will be greatly apreciated
Beta Marine is primarily a distributor of engines for displacement boats, as such the answers given here are speculative and we make no guaranty of the accurracy given in the response as your requirement is for a planing boat. Also, we have no experience with surface drives, these are usually associated with high performance boats, so we are not able to respond regarding this type of propulsion system with a small lightweight diesel.
You have not given much information regarding the boat to allow us to respond fully, so we have made some assumptions.
We estimate that our 35 HP diesel will give you a top speed of approx. 14mph. Our bigger engines will obviously allow you to go a little bit faster. We have assumed using 1.5:1 transmission to give you good propeller speed. We cannot comment on using this configuration for trolling, however my prior knowledge tells me that hydraulic transmissions with trolling valves are required with diesel engines, this is possible, but it would add additional expense, as we would normally use a mechanical transmission on this size of engine.
I will not discuss prices on this forum, please contact Beta Marine on 877-227-2473 or email me robert@betamarinenc.com for information.