Surface Drive mud motors for western River applications?

[Fatcamp]

I have an aluminum flat bottom duck boat with a high hp performance surface drive, and run the rivers in the pnw all year long, from bass fishing to salmon to duck season I run mine year round, Rhett make a rock gaurd that bolts to your skeg of the outdrive, it has saved my bacon a couple times. At the end of the day it comes down to knowledge of the river system and reading water


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Gonna need to see some pictures, friend.

 

[dallen]

I have both and have run both for a lot of years. In shallow hard bottomed rivers and creeks, a jet boat is the way to go. I’ve run mud motors in those conditions and it does ok until you start hitting bottom and it kicks up on you,You lose momentum and if it’s still shallow, your pushing a boat. In muddy/soft bottom and vegetation the mud motor wins hands down. If your predominately running gravel/rock bottom shallow water, get a jet.

Maintenance wise, I don’t think either are more or less difficult. A mud motor is much easier to tear down and rebuild as it just has less stuff.Im on my second mm and am running an EFI model. The first one was a black death 4500 that I put around 1800-2000 hours on it. Jet boats will wear down impellers running sand and gravel and mm will wear out props if running those same conditions (sand will eat a mm prop amazingly fast).

as others have said……two different motors for different conditions.