How does the Nitro compare to the Hell’s Bay from purely a design perspective? It’s very different, here are the details a 17' 4'' length, beam of 8' 4'' and a dry weight of 1,450 lbs.
For cruising, the Yamaha ran best at 3,500 RPM at 30 MPH, getting 8.87 MPG, which is great. I couldn’t find actual tests but anecdotally owners of Marquesa’s the with the Mercury 115 ProXS report 52 MPH, which is where you could get this Yamaha to run with a few adjustments, showing how close these two match up. If you were going for a top speed, removing the trolling motor, power pole and some gear you could see a little better. Test weight includes Power Pole, 2 Lithium Ion batteries, 2 people, 5 gallons of fuel, safety and test gear. With a 115 SHO, from the Yamaha bulletins, the little Hell’s Bay runs 51.2 MPH at 6,000 RPM, turning a 20” 13-⅛” Talon SS prop. Amazingly, the Hell’s Bay only drafts 7” of water.
The focus is shallow water capability and being able to get to fishing areas other boats can’t. However, they are fishing machines and very well built. These are light but basically flat hulls, 12 degree deadrise, with very little lift, so they aren’t as fast as you would think. At 18’1” and a 6’7” beam, the boat was tested at 1,100 lbs. The Hell’s Bay Marquesa is a really cool technical skiff / flats boat. Fishing boats tend to be a heavier and going fast isn’t the focus. These boats will be slow compared to performance boats like an old Hydrostream, Action, any Allison or any other light V pad performance hulls. We will look at a Nitro bass boat vs a Hell’s Bay flats boat and a Crestliner aluminum bass boat vs an Xpress aluminum bass boat. Unfortunately, it was difficult to find proper bass boat tests with the Yamaha. This is why I love this category, if you’re repowering an older lightweight performance boat, these are truly light engines.īass boats are always good tests to look at because they are semi performance hulls and many in this size are very similar, so we can get some good head to head type comparisons even if it’s not the exact same hull.
115 mercury motor pro#
Both are light, with the Pro XS being slightly lighter, 360 Lbs. Let’s take a look at some tests knowing that this is about as close as it gets in an incredibly competitive engine class. The Mercury command thrust has 2.33:1 gears which are housed in the larger 4.9” case from the 150 HP. I would give the advantage to Mercury here, potentially more torque with taller gears is going to equate to more speed when everything else is equal. Standard gearcases are similar, with the 115 ProXS offering the taller 2.07:1 ratio over the Yamaha’s 2.15:1. Of course, both probably make very similar HP, definitely more than 115 HP technically, and both are allowed to rev 300 more RPM than the regular versions. The Yamaha utilizes a double overhead cam with 4 valves per cylinder, whereas Mercury uses a more traditional 2 valve SOHC setup.īoth of these 4 cylinder engines will have great low end torque, the Mercury having a slight displacement edge, 2.1L to 1.8L and Yamaha having a slight edge with the DOHC 4 valve design making more power up top. Both engines come in 20” or 25” mid sections. Where Mercury leads is in options, you can get an optional “Command Thrust” gearcase with the Merc a larger diameter case with lower gears for pushing bigger boats. When it comes to comparing the Yamaha and the Merc it is no surprise that they are so close in almost every detail. For our purposes I want to look at the Mercury 115 Pro XS and the Yamaha 115 Vmax SHO version, the semi performance versions of these diminutive 4 cylinder four strokes. There are 2 serious contenders here, maybe 3 if you include Suzuki but the Mercury 115 and Yamaha 115 are the leaders by far when it comes to specifications. An incredibly versatile power option for fishing boats of all kinds, small runabouts, small pontoons and almost any boat under 19’ really. Because of the popularity of our comparison articles, I thought it would be fun to do one for the best 115 HP outboards.