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Hi. I recently purchased my first Whaler which is a 2002 130 Sport with a 40hp Merc 2 Stoke on the back. The boat is great but ideally I’d like to make it a bit more fishing friendly with the addition of a Bow Mounted Trolling motor if possible. I have seen that people have successfully mounted them to the bow before. Any info/pictures detailing the installation would be greatly appreciated as well as any potential problems to look out for. Has anyone experienced and structural issues with this kind of installation? A very close friend of mine is a boat builder/amazing craftsman and I will be definitely use his assistance. He has suggested (due to the lack of wood in the bow) that we would have to drill through The bow and put a form of a backer plate below the rub rail to add rigidity for something to bolt to so we would end up with stress cracks overtime. Any thoughts on this? All comments are greatly appreciated.
Does your boat have railing? If so you might want to look at mounting to the rails. That's what I did. I built a hardwood varnished block that the trolling motor mounts to. The block in turn sits on the bow gunnel and is secured to the rail with SS straps. It sits just to the starboard side of the bow light. The gunnel supports the weight of the motor but the thrust is through the railing. We use a 45 pound trolling motor and it handles it with no problem. There is no hardware into the hull. If this is something you may be interested in I could try to post a photo.
The only disadvantage is that the mounting block obstructs a small angle of the green light.
By the way, our boat is a 1972 13', so a 2002 model may be quite different. I'm not familiar with these models.
Thanks for the idea. My boat does have side railings but not the full wrap around style that goes around the bow. I would love to see a picture if you could upload one. I have only seen a few bow mounted on the 130 sports and I super curious to hear how they were mounted and how they have held up. I called Boston Whaler and they didn’t have any information for me but they did suggest I try on here. I appreciate the help.
