We are also in SW Florida and sometimes do a lot of shallows, mangrove trails, deep inlets, canals, rivers, paddling trails, etc. There are large sections of Sarasota bay that are only six inches deep at low tide. We used to spend a lot of time in the keys also, (mostly around key west where we had a house for many years, splitting our time between the two). If you only go in the deep water, (channels, etc), your missing up to 80% of the pristine beauty of the area. We also travel a lot all over the country, ( about 1/4million road miles with our Hobies on the roof and RV in tow, over the last few yrs). We have owned many different canoes and kayaks over the years, and pretty much settled on and prefer Hobie mirage yaks over everything else because of their reliability, extreme durability, (darn near industructible), versatality, (we use ours for anything and everything we can dream up). We don’t fish much, (except spear fishing, where we can select from the menu,(lol)). But we do a lot of long distance touring, we like to follow rivers to their headwaters and explore wild areas off the beaten path. For our purposes what we found the best setup for us is just regular mirage turbo drives, yea you can turn the drive around for reverse, but honestly we only do that once in a blue moon. We typically are on tandems, and if approaching a sketchy area, we will reverse one of the drives, to move around tight quarters like harbors and such. In mangrove tunnels we tend to keep our double end paddles handy. We have also never launched a Hobie without a sail kit, furled up and strapped to the side of the kayak, (not even once in ten years, lol just in case we find wind). What we found to work best for us is to buy and install the Hobie large saling rudder on all our kayaks, we then saw the bottom off the rudder so we have about the same turning ability as the small regular rudder, but can operate in much shallower water, (6-8” easily). Next we learned how to shallow peddle our mirage drives well, (takes a lot of practice), instead of peddling in a full ark, full strokes, you can configure your peddles (optionally, we don’t usually bother though), so they flip up and down like a butterfly. With practice you can peddle almost as efficiently shallow peddling. Heck the drives are so durable we even do mild rapids with our mirage drives in sometimes. And yes we bounce off mangrove roots, and logs all the time. Yes on weedy rivers the mirage drives need to be cleared of weeds very once in a while, obviously if your going thru thick lili pads and intense weeds, (like on the SantaFe river mid summer, ya gotta pull the drives anyway, and just paddle). To clear the rudder of weeds you just flip it up and down once in a while to clear weeds. With the cutoff sailing rudder, you can still kayak sail ok. The mirage drives are extremely durable, we seldom pull the drives out, if we pull up on a sand bar we sometimes just fold and lock the mirage drives against the hull (with the bungy). Yea they get scratched up dragging in the sand and oyster beds, and so does the bottom of the boat, but it’s pretty easy to clean up and repair once in a while, we flip our boat over annually and clean and repair the bottom, the rest of the year we don’t even look at it, ( the darn boats are nearly industructable). We have always kayaked via the brail method, (lol). I haven’t ran a propel system, I would think if your mostly in 3ft of water, the propel would probably be fine, but if you regularly operate in 8” of water like we do, I’ll keep my mirage drives, thankyou. The new 180 drives, from everything I reading appear to be a small step up (more geared toward fishing than touring (what we do), lol if I get a new boat, it will likely have the 180 drives, I won’t complain, I doubt we would use the reverse feature much doing touring end adventure stuff. One other aspect that is important to us is expending energy and efficiency. With both my wife and me on our Tandem Island, ( in kayak only mode, no AMA’s), the boat glides and tracks more efficiently than any other kayak we have ever owned, we can easily peddle at a walking pace up quiet rivers and lakes up to ten hrs with just one person peddling, (we couldn’t do that with our old Oasis). I peddle 90% of the time, when I want a break she takes over for a while. We are not tryiing to win any races, just a walking like pace expending the least amound of energy. Obviously not as efficient as a $7000 dollar 24ft proa, but not half bad either, (lol with the TI you get a free sailboat to boot). Actually the adventure line of boats are the ultimate offshore slayer for big offshore game fish, (swordfish, mahi, tuna, marlin, big ole groupers, etc) if your into that stuff.
Anyone who goes on any of our Hobies, (mostly family/grand kids from up north) get a 5 minute lecture and instructions on how to properly use mirage drives, (has saved us a fortune), just sayin FE
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