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My dad and I are buying an 8ft pelican 2 man boat on Sunday to fish ponds, strip cuts, and small lakes with. I'm looking at different ways to set it up and make it as comfortable as we can. While still making it easy to load and unload. Anyone have any tips or experience? Thanks.
On main page, go to Kayaks, Canoes, and other small watercraft link and do a search for sun dolphin or pelican two man bass boat. One of the pages has some real good pictures for setting up one of these boats.
I had one like that for years and loved it for strip pits and farm ponds. I Bought a cheap Piranha sonar. For the transducer mount I took a 2 foot piece of 3/4 inch pvc and heated it and bent it 90 degrees with one end 10 inches long. Mounted the transducer to the long end just by drilling some holes and mounting transducer base to that. And mounted it to the boat just by using adjustable auto hose clamps on one of the carrying handles. That way I could remove it for transporting. And I powered it with a 12 volt dry cell battery you can buy anywhere and put the battery in a small plastic tackle box and mounted the sonar unit to the top of the tackle box and stored the charging plug and the sonar in the tackle box when not in use, it was very portable. I just used a floating fish basket tied to a boat carrying handle to put fish in because when you have 2 people in it it's pretty full.Attachment 230909Attachment 230910
Yeah we're gonna use a basket as well. I'm hoping to get a depth finder on it but not gonna have one right away. Thinking about mounting 2 oar brackets one on each side. I'm thinking of putting some plywood and carpet in for flooring as well.
I forgot to add that I drilled a hole through the lid of the box under the sonar mount just large enough for the wire between the sonar and battery to fit through so there were no wires hanging out to get a foot or rod caught in. And I put a small swing set type chain on the box handle and with a caribiner I would attach it to a boat seat leg so it wouldn't go swimming.
I had on similar to that years ago. Lots of different things you can do to them. My one piece of advice is if using trolling motor on front to pull boat, make you a rudder for rear of boat. I used a old hand control motor and took off motor part, split shaft with hack saw and bolted in a 12 x6 piece of aluminum. With out the rudder you will get really frustrated because every time you shut off trolling motor it will spin around on you. Saw one made with a piece of conduit and a C clamp. And like Kenny's depth finder setup, before mounting anything try to figure out how to make it portable.