A 20-22 foot pontoon boat, if equipped with the a third tube (either ¾ or full tube), will make much better use of the 115hp power. Although to do a lot, your boat will typically need a few features. With that said, a 115hp engine on a pontoon can do a lot. So, unless you are buying a pontoon under 20 feet, buying for use on a small lake, or want a pontoon just for cruising and don’t care so much about resale value, 115hp is your baseline. My intention isn’t to start off discussing buying a boat with worrying about resale from the start, but I think this gives some direct insight into not only what the market is seeking, but what people are expecting from pontoons today. We have found that anything under 115hp is “unappreciated” in the pre-owned market (in our experience, the resale market for under 115 horsepower 20-25 ft boats is weak and has limited value). To start, unless you are on a small water body, have specific low horsepower needs and/or plan to keep the pontoon for a very long time, the baseline for horsepower has increased over the last few years.
Unhappy isn’t good, so we will try to generalize a bit here, give some advice, as well as note some pros and cons along the horsepower spectrum. If you don’t take into consideration what exactly you want your boating experience to look and feel like, you can end up being unhappy. The challenge to choosing horsepower for a pontoon is that the answers to all the above questions we ask our guests, and perhaps a few more, need to be understood. However, ultimately every guest has found our investigative process to be helpful and they find themselves pleased with their final choice, even if the boat they ultimately choose has a different amount of horsepower than they originally thought. Occasionally, buyers feel our questions are very personal and prying (we do ask a lot of them!). We also want to understand what speed means to them, if and what watersports they will participate in, and the age and experience level of any watersports participants. That’s not good!Īt Bridge Marina, we always like to ask lots of questions to new boat buyers, especially pontoon buyers, about what they want their boating experience to look and feel like, including how many people they want to take out, and how fast they want to go with those people.
In the end, these buyers soon find out that they were sold too small of an engine and are sort of stuck with a bad overall boat and weak experience. An added issue is that some boat dealers will sell unsuspecting buyers under-powered pontoons as they appear much more affordable and seem to be a great deal (the higher the horsepower, typically the higher the price tag). A lot of factors add to this unknown, including some misconceptions, bad advice, and/or lack of information in the market. In our experience, we find guests that are getting into a pontoon boat have a hard time understanding what they need for horsepower (hp). In this quick article, we are hoping to shed some light and answer a few questions related to engine horsepower(hp) that we hear often. “How much horsepower?” is a common question for boat buyers and the answer is most often misunderstood, incorrectly estimated, or misleading.
0 kommentar(er)
