I hunt the Tennessee River. Anyone using a mud motor boat for duck hunting and fishing when the water level is a winter pool? Would like to hear pros and cons. I currently use a SeaArk Rivercat 200 for everything. The downside is the prop and lower unit in the winter
Since the mud motors have, per local views, "ruined" much of the Tennessee river duck hunting , they apparently must work there in those waters.
I am in Idaho but I run rivers and lakes that although natural, are dam controlled for hydropower and flood control. The difference between summer and winter pool is anywhere from 7' to 11' less depth. We run in the shallows a lot but I can't say I am grinding through cake batter mud like the boys down south of you. There are a lot of downed, sunken logs from a century and a half of logging. Plus rocks and / or gravel bars. I ran a shorttail mud motor for 16 years. Last year, I went back to a prop outboard, but I put it on a hydraulic-electric jackplate. My thought is if I could run 90% of the places I used to go I would be happy. I achieved that and it only cost me a beat-up prop. I figure I will go through a prop a year, whereas a mud motor prop would last multiple years. I am actually thinking of changing to a tunnel hull, where I can run super skinny after I am up on pad. A mud motor isn't as easy to drive or as fast as an outboard and I am no spring chicken. Your experience may vary.
Those of us who started running mud motors on the TN River in AL, years ago, ran them purely because of some specific places we wanted go, whether here or in other states....not because they were best at everything. 95% of the folks running them on the River these days don’t ‘need’ them, for anything they do.....the other 5% bow fish. Mud motors haven’t affected ducks here, 5k more duck hunters packed into the same stretch have been the ‘impact’. From Nickajack to Pickwick, you can get most anywhere you want to be with an outboard, these days.....summer or winter, other than some weeds, all the true mud motor places are gone from different water management or there’s already 15 there fighting over the 3 spots. I use them in other places, states, terrain....but don’t need them ON the River.
Not all places. Upper Chickamauga from Grasshopper to Old Washington was in the mud this year. Backwater sloughs were a no go. Watts Bar from the damn to Caney Creek the same. Fishermen were running aground in the main channel at Blue Springs Anything out of the buoys was in the mud. You moved at your own risk
