Making a couple of mods on my 1542 tracker. Took middle seat out patched live well hole. Cut in an access door on front seat for battery. Mounted winch and added braces in place of seat in the middle. Welded backh20 pods on. I am trying to make as much space as possible for decoys. I am hoping a 3 gallon gas tank will be enough. The longest distance I am running is 3/4 of a mile but it should take me 15 minutes each way of full throttle. What do you guys think.

That's wat I had on my go devil and only ran out of gas 1 time and that was about 15 miles round trip in tha river with 3 ppl in a 1242. After that I carried a 2 gallon can for backup and never needed it.

If your boat planes out 3 gallons is plenty. I run16 miles round trip and burn about 2 gallons. I have a 16x42 with a 23 LT running 19 - 20. With a two man duck hunt load.

Thanks guys. That is amazing

Can only vouch for the 25/27 Kohler motors, very similar to the others here...run 12.5 miles roundtrip, use 2.3 gallons. Always had a 6 gallon tank so I could always do a couple of consecutive hunts without refueling. Sure beats the cost of fueling an airboat.

Trousertrout, noticed you wanted to "make as much room as possible for decoys". How many decoys do you typically employ? It took me a number of years to realize that after the first couple of weeks, I typically did not see any large number of birds working but the rest of the season settled down to smaller bands so I went down from 3-4 dozen to 1.5 dozen and did a lot better. This made for more space on board and easier process of setting out and picking up decoys. I have also switched qualitatively in the last year from plastic to cork decoys that I fashioned- of course now that I use slotted bags for the corkers the space savings are somewhat minimized. I did pick up one of those MB/Splash side mount decoy bags which helped with the plastic ones- that will now be used to carry camo sheets and some other items. Years ago I bought and tried out a metal gun box, an angled one designed to use efficiently agains the side of the boat, but sold it because it still took up too much room in my open hull 1648 jon. I also acquired a Splash gun sleeve which has worked quite well to hold two scatterguns w/cases, lights, and misc. items. I think you did good on removing that middle bench- that was a pain on my last jon boat- kept tripping over it and busting my shins on it- I removed the flotation from one of my rear pods and made that a storage/electronics panel. Put some flotation under my alum floor to partially offset that flotation loss.

The 23 hp motor does really go on fuel. I run a 6.5 gal tank and i fill up every 3-4 trips. My runs are 7-10 miles one way. I run wide open all the time.I was thinking of put a 3 gal tank in to save some weight. Take a 1 gal tank with ya on the 1st couple trips and see if ya need it. My bet is you won't.

Glades I am. Usually running 5 doz decoys but unfortunately I have to do mojos also. I usually do 4 mojos, 3 decoys on a jerk cord and 1 swimmer. When we freeze up here I can go down to a dozen blocks because I am the only one getting out.

23 will run all day on 5 gallons, at least my Briggs does.

I have 23 kohlers on my work trailer and they will run 11 hours on 5 gallons pretty much full throttle all the time.