Fishing with Electric Outboard

On Tuesday we talked about getting electric trolling motors on large saltwater boats, but as trolling motors have developed for larger and larger boats, there have been developments at the opposite end of the spectrum: electric outboards, for small boats. I’ve never been a huge fan of using electric outboards as the main propulsion system for fishing boats. With most you have to just about fill your boat with batteries to get any kind of range, and they generally cost an arm and a leg. Torqeedo made some interesting developments through the years and today builds some of the largest mass-produced outboards around (up to 80 hp), but still, the battery requirements are huge and for most of us, cost-prohibitive. It seems, however, that the market is responding to the demand for less expensive, more easily powered electric outboards. Case in point: I’ve been testing an ePropulsion Spirit 1.0 Plus on my little jon boat, and the results have been rather shocking.

Compared to the old 55-pound thrust transom-mount electric I used to run the boat with, the Spirit 1.0 Plus has doubled speed, more than halved battery weight, and most surprisingly, quadrupled range. The big factor here is, as usual, battery technology. The 19-pound battery, which clips onto the top of the shaft providing a very outboard-like appearance, has 1,276 watt-hours of lithium-polymer power. ePropulsion says this gives it a range of around 22 miles at a “reasonable” speed, but I think they’re offering a conservative figure; I’ve fished multiple days with it from sunrise to sunset and haven’t managed to use up half of the juice in a trip yet. Nor have I seen any of the early signs of corrosion or wear. The biggest surprise, however, is that is retails for around $2,000. That’s about 25-percent less than the closest electric competitor (which has 20-percent less juice in its battery) and around double the cost of an average 2.5 hp gasoline outboard.

True, we’re talking about seriously small motors that can’t really do the job on boats of any significant size. The point here is simply that the tech is changing incredibly rapidly, and new electric outboards are popping up year after year which out-do the existing motors on the market by leaps and bounds. While we don’t think electrics are going to replace V8s or even inline-fours any time soon, at the very low end of the powerband they now make a lot more sense than they did just a few years ago.

Lenny Rudow