The quietest trolling motor for shallow water is a brushless unit with stepless speed control paired with a short shaft, because noise comes from gear whine and cavitation rather than raw power. After running ten of the leading quiet trolling motors for shallow water across six weeks on flats, bays, and weedy lakes, the Newport … Read more
Finding the best trolling motors for jon boats comes down to one number: how much thrust your hull needs once you add two anglers, batteries and gear. A jon is light enough that almost any motor will move it, but the wrong one leaves you crawling when wind picks up or current pushes back. I … Read more
Choosing the best transom mount trolling motors for small boats comes down to three numbers: thrust, shaft length and battery capacity. Get any of them wrong and you end up with a motor that overheats, sits too shallow, or strands you a mile from the launch. I have spent seasons running electric motors on jon … Read more
For all-day runtime on a 12V trolling motor, a 100Ah deep-cycle LiFePO4 battery is the sweet spot. It stores 1280Wh, gives up roughly 95% of that as usable capacity, and at a typical 30A draw runs about three hours. Two of them in parallel, or one 200Ah pack, is what a full day of spot-lock … Read more
There is a specific kind of frustration that shows up on angler message boards every single season. You paddle for forty minutes, find a clean shoreline with good structure, and then realize you have burned your entire morning just getting there. Now you are stuck, either staying put and catching far less than you should, … Read more
The best trolling motors for canoes are not the biggest motors on the shelf. They are the ones that clamp onto a narrow gunwale, run off a single 12V deep-cycle battery, and do not turn an 80 lb aluminium hull into a boat that wallows. I have spent the last two summers rigging motor after … Read more
Every angler who has fought a spinning anchor in rising wind eventually decides the same thing: steering by hand is no fun. The best bow mount trolling motors with GPS take that job away from you, holding the bow over a specific coordinate so both hands stay free for casting and fighting fish. I have … Read more
The best trolling motors for bass boats are the ones that hold a spot in wind, stay quiet over shallow cover, and match the fish finder already bolted into your console. We compared nine of them, from a 30 lb freshwater transom motor to an 80 lb bow mount with sonar built into the head. … Read more
After six weeks of comparing insulated bibs, reading long-term owner reports, and watching how these garments hold up when you kneel on ice for four hours, one thing became clear: the best ice fishing bibs for cold weather are not the ones with the biggest insulation number on the label. They are the ones that … Read more
An ice fishing sled is a small boat-shaped utility sled, usually roto-molded polyethylene or heavy injection-molded plastic with 8-inch side walls and a full-perimeter lip, used to hand-pull or machine-tow an auger, heater, rods and a portable shelter across lake ice. Hauling ice fishing gear across lake ice is its own problem: the load is … Read more