The past month or so I've spent a bunch of time working on my boat. I got it at the end of last summer and I love it. It’s a 2006 G3 1860 that is in fantastic shape. There were a couple things that I knew need to be changed to make it suit my needs. The most involved of which was upgrading the trolling motor. It came with a foot control 40 thrust 12v motor on the front. For power, it worked well enough if the water was calm. Add current or wind and it was not capable of moving my big boat sufficiently. I also hated the foot control. So I replaced it with a 70lb thrust 24v tiller hand steer. The crux of the problem was that there was already a starter battery, the existing deep cycle, the 20 gallon onboard gas tank, and usually 2 people sitting at the back of the boat. Adding a second deep cycle would be too much weight in the stern. So I began the process of figuring out how to put 2 batteries under the front deck without having found a resource on how to do this.
This is the layout of the boat.
I took out the one dry storage box to see what was doing underneath and marked off the width of the batteries.
I mounted the battery trays to ½” plywood. I had to cut the “firewall” to make enough room for the two batteries.
I set them in place and wired them up to test everything.
I then mounted the 3 bank onboard charger to the “firewall” and wired it up to the deep cycle batteries. I also wired the third bank using the existing wires that were for the old deep cycle in the back, but hooked it up to the starter battery. I then put the dry storage box back in to wrap it up. You can’t even tell that there are batteries under the deck.
I also mounted a plug port to the front of the deck so all I will have to do is plug in an extension cord to it to charge all of three batteries.
While I was at it I put in 3 rod tubes on the side so that I can have 3 fully assemble fly rods in the rod holders using thin walled 1 ½” PVC and capped them with rubber grommets from Custom Gheenoe.
I have yet to put it on the water to see if it changes how it rides on the water now that there’s more weight up front, but I’m planning to get out Saturday afternoon. Hopefully this can be helpful to someone on here. I would have saved me some time if I had seen something like this prior to starting the project.