BASS BOAT DRIVING 101 - BOAT WAKES

okay here we are bass boat driving boat wakes edition we are out here on beautiful smith mountain lake this is a typical recreation lake in the summertime and as you i mean they're both passing us behind us this is uh if you're familiar with the hills ford bridge area it is in the middle of the week but it's still um still a fair amount of traffic going on i know earlier in the summer it was a crazy amount of traffic but we're going to try to give you some tips and teach you how to drive better in boat wakes predominantly with a bass boat but a lot of these applications can go to you know bow riders and other boats as well so we're just going to kind of go over some of that different stuff and a little bit more help you drive better in boat wakes so here we go let's take off [Music] all right so we uh we just took us a little stroll uh ran through a few boat wakes nothing major and just to kind of give you a you know a synopsis of what the real situation is what the problem is with with boat wakes uh smaller boat wakes in general are not a problem for a you know 18 to 21 foot bass boat generally smaller boat lakes you know boats that are on plane smaller boats on plane going fast generally not much of a problem on you know up to like three quarters of full speed if you're gonna go run half speed you know you know there's a basket era very fast boat it'll run in the mid 70s under most conditions you know with most loads you can run faster than that but if you're running more than about 60 miles an hour in a bass boat boat wakes can become a major problem and something you need to be very aware of so just to kind of lay out the baseline if you are driving 30 to 40 miles an hour in a bass boat and even slower you can drive 25 miles an hour and stay on plane if you're driving that slow and you keep your the nose of your boat relatively trimmed down you're not over trimmed you can cut through most any boat wake and not have any problem and be safe so let's let's just get that out of the way first and that's what i would recommend unless you are in a mega hurry or unless you're trying to do something uh to where you need to run faster don't don't run run a little bit slower keep keep the the trim uh you don't want to keep it digging all the way in you want to trim it up just a little bit from trimmed all the way down if you watch my bass boat driving tips and talking about getting on plane and trim uh those other videos explain all of that so when you're getting on plane you're going to be trimmed all the way down but once you get up off a plane and you're going to be encountering a lot of these boat wakes which we're kind of right in the middle of right here uh you want to you want to trim that up just a little bit to take that pressure off of the nose diving into the waves take that pressure off a little bit and then the the front of the hole the v in there can do its job and split those wakes uh kind of no matter what angle they're coming from uh that's a that's a big deal so that's a big part of it now let's go after this wakeboard boat and we're gonna we're gonna show you how to properly pass a boat with their boat wigs we'll do that go run that boat down okay so as you can see uh it was not totally ideal uh but there was not a lot of room to where i could i really felt comfortable because we had this boat right here that was getting ready to pass us i was a little uncomfortable with cutting perpendicular i felt like i was going to be cutting right in front of that boat so i had to i had to kind of just navigate that way and what i call you know sliding over that wake when you do that make sure that you slow down you do not want to do that at full speed full throttle you want to slow down so that you can ride that wave over and then sometimes the bigger boat wakes they'll have two or three waves you have to ride over in order to get a get across and uh and then continue to navigate so those are a couple big tips on getting over boats uh as you're coming up from behind them uh that's a big big deal right there and then the other the other part is you know occasionally you'll run into these massive massive boats that are putting out three and four foot waves those ones uh you can do either way just like just like a wakeboard boat like we just showed you but with those ones it is imperative that you slow down big big deal is to slow down when you're going over those really big waves you can you can mess up in a hurry you can launch and a lot of that comes from just paying attention knowing what's around you know there's a jet ski there's a way boat there if you see one of those 30 40 50 foot cruisers be looking for the wakes because i promise you they're there and the crazy thing is they last for a long time they last for a long time so you just got to be got to be careful and be aware of that as well um so those are those are a couple big big tips if you have any back issues you may want to get yourself a cushion i'm not joking you i mean bass cat's got one of the greatest rides in in all of bass plates but it doesn't matter whether if you have a ranger or what what um if you get to a cushion i don't mean like a throw cushion i mean like a one of those gel memory foam cushions you can get them for your car you can get them for your office chair get one of those stick it under your seat it will help cushion the boat wakes make that a little bit more pleasurable experience if that's a problem for you but i love the bass cat seats i think they're perfect they they contour right to my butt um and so when i hit waves uh a the era is not a hard-hitting bass bow and and i love these seats so i don't want to mess anything up there but that's just another little tip i figured i'd throw out there let's go find some more boat wigs i do i really didn't emphasize it enough earlier but when we were just going over those other boat wakes uh i kind of reminded me and i don't know if you could see it in in the video but when you're going over boat wakes again don't have the front of your boat trimmed all the way down uh the bass boat bass boats have uh the the strikes on the bottom however you want to call them i don't build bass boats so don't slaughterfest me for not having the proper terms okay but i can tell you those lines on the bottom of the boat are there for grip and they grip they help the hole grip the water for when you're going around turns navigating uh the boat can run properly that that grip if your boat is trimmed all the way down and the entire running surface of your hull is in the water and being forced down into the water what happens is when you when you run across boat wakes sideways uh you know going left and right they will they will pull the front of your boat left and right and it can it can be an uncontrollable situation in a bass boat i've seen it i've done it i'm telling you be sure if you're going to go at any rate of speed through boat wakes do not have your boat trimmed all the way down you want to make sure that you pull that boat up as i was mentioning earlier so that the hull can do its work but really it helps you control the direction that your boat is going uh because you're both you know we're going we're bouncing side to side going over these wakes if your boat has too much down force on the front of the hull it's going to be getting pulled left and right left and right it's going to be uncomfortable you're going to the boat will go out of control pull trim that boat up just a little bit i'm telling you just a little bit um you know kind of like mid-range for your trim every boat's a little different so the gauges if i tell you to look on your gauge every gauge is different it's hard to speculate there but you're going to trim up probably halfway between where it starts to tilt and you know all the way down somewhere in halfway not maybe not quite there but that will pull the pressure off of the front of that boat you can navigate sideways through boat wakes much much easier so again that's why i wanted to emphasize that do not run in boat wakes with your your boat trimmed all the way down that's a big big tip the other the other tip as i mentioned earlier is to just slow down a little bit that goes a long ways and keeping control of your boat and then as i showed you earlier about going perpendicular through the waves uh the boat wakes whenever you can do that that is a huge deal and and i hope that you're able to take something away from this video and and apply it next time you're out there driving your bass boat and if you have any other tips that you want to share with the community of people watching this video any other tips about driving through boat wakes be sure to hit it down there in the comments put it down there we want to hear from you we want to know what you know what what you've learned maybe you can add on to something uh maybe you disagree with something i said let's let's talk about that let's put that down there in the comments and if you want to see any other boat bass boat driving tips we've got more coming down the road but if you want to see them be sure to hit that up in the comments down below and again always thanks for watching and please hit that subscribe button just [Music] you

Channel: John Crews

Views: 36,168

Rating: 4.8566308 out of 5

Keywords: bass fishing, how to, john crews, pro angler, bassmaster, bass, boat driving, bass boat, boat wakes

Id: -wCunzr3fy8

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020