I’ve had this motor on a 24’ cc for a couple of years now and have been highly pleased. Easy enough to deploy and stow, powerful enough to pull my 5,000 lb boat and quiet. I opted for this model over the self deploying model because I had heard a lot of stories about issues people were having with the self deploy. I guess it is a case of more features, more things to break. Deploying this motor is easy enough that it isn’t a big deal to do it manually. I love the gps anchor function which does a nice job of holding the boat in a spot (but burns battery so don't use for hours). Love it.

Big came in damaged. Unit looks ok so far

Installed it on a 2019 Mako proskiff 17. 80lb thrust is plenty of power to move the boat around. Spot lock is the greatest thing. Makes it real safe to fish with kids again. No more worrying about getting to close to any hard object.

f I would have fished on a boat with one just once I would have bought an ipilot years ago.

If you fish by yourself or take people who do not fish a whole lot this thing is an absolute must. It completely frees you up. I can retie lures, take a fish off the hook, and actually fish without constantly running to the bow to make an adjustment on my old hand control.

I tell you what I am very glad I went with the 72". It does not get in the way at all. It does not take up much deck space and is sized perfectly for this boat, IMO.

Where you see it set in the following picture is about where it needs to be to keep from blowing out when I go full throttle with two people in the back of the boat. I can run it a lot higher but if I open it up very quickly (start off at 10 power) it will make some noise churning up the water on the surface. I was worried about it kind of getting in the way being to high when using but that is not the case.

The model I got is the riptide terrova bluetooth and it has some awesome features. The best of which is the jog feature. It comes with a heading sensor that I mounted near the transom. This sensor lets the trolling motor know which direction the boat is oriented. So if I'm "spot-locked" and I want to move the boat a little to port I just hit the left arrow. Every time I hit the button it moves five feet. If I end up too close to a spot I hit the plus sign and the boat moves 5 feet forward. This keeps you from having to disengage spot lock and manually drive the boat to change your position. Great feature, used it bunch this morning fine tuning my position.

I'm looking forward to using the record a track feature. I have a couple spots I always hit and I troll slowly down the edge of the bank. Now I can record my track while I'm manually running the trolling motor. When I get to the end I save it. Then I can go anytime in the future back to that spot and the trolling motor will remember my route and it will navigate the edge of the bank all by itself. Pretty crazy....

It also has the lift assist feature. Stowing and deploying is a breeze. I can actually deploy it, stand it all the way up, and just let go of it. It "semi-slowly" lowers down to where you have the depth collar set. Also when stowing you actually are only lifting maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of the weight of the motor. It is VERY easy to raise and lower. Best I can tell it has a coiled up strip of metal inside a housing mounted to the stand. The metal wants to stay coiled up. When you lower the motor the metal uncoils and lays flat against the shaft (slowing down the descent). When you raise it the metal (wanting to coil back up into the housing) helps lift the motor. This is my guess at how it works anyway, could be completely wrong. All I know is it is very easy to operate.

I was extremely happy with the accuracy of the spotlock. They said they achieved better accuracy on these newer models by upgraded the algorithms or something. I'm not sure how the older ones did but I don't think this one ever went more than 5 feet in any one direction off of it's spot. Unless you stand all the way at the bow and block it's view of the sky.

Easy to follow directions, guick bluetooth pairing,