Best prop for Altitude?

Thanks everyone for your views and comments. We are primarily skiers and only wake board at the very amateur level. I am more concerned about top speed for footing and skiing performance. We pick up the boat one day before we leave for Lake Powell so I guess we will have a great testing ground to see how the stock prop goes....

882001 wrote: 80nauts wrote: there is mutch to gain by spending money on a different prop. Save your money for GAS. .oh yeah my fuel economy doubled with my prop swap so it is paying for itsself. if you dont wakeboard with alot of weight you probably wont get that result

Your fuel economy doubled??? That's pretty hard to believe. Was your old prop is really bad shape?

i only run 1200# in fat sacs one 600# on each side of the motor cover and run around 6-8 people + gear, sub boxes, cooler so around 2800# total and it was suffering with the old prop. like a quarter mile to plain and guzzleing gas. now instant plaining, never floor it. my buddy was pulling me and used to the other prop and it was hurting me. the other day we had the normal weight and added another sac in the back. it took up too much room. but didnt hurt performance. i dont think ypu can put that much weight in a 80. we used to run through a full tank after work from 4-9 and now about a half a tank.

882001 Neither of my buds are running the 542, so my observations could be tainted by idiot prop changing without studying. How does the 542 differ from your previous one(please include your boarding setup and results)?

I would still bet that these 351's in the smaller and older Nautiques have plenty of HP's to push a heavily weighted boat without a problem. If you need a low torque prop then you are probrably using too much weight, or your boat hull takes too much weight to make a killer wake. But since you have a 2001 then you should have noticed that they don't take much weight at all to throw a great wake. Often times people make the mistake of loading too much weight which causes the wake to wash out at proper wakeboarding speeds. Then they try to correct it by going 25 mpg or so which makes it painful to wakeboard due to harder landing and crashing from the dynamics of water moving faster.

80nauts wrote: there is mutch to gain by spending money on a different prop. Save your money for GAS.

.oh yeah my fuel economy doubled with my prop swap so it is paying for itsself. if you dont wakeboard with alot of weight you probably wont get that result

Hey bkhallpass,

My observations of the prop differences were done in Utah at Jordanelle Res. which is currently at 6,166.09 feet. In reality I don't think there is mutch to gain by spending money on a different prop. Save your money for GAS.

I'd be more concerned with the carb. than the prop.

I am becoming a believer of leaving your prop alone. I have a few friends who have changed their prop. They swear that it helps their boating performance, but whenever I ride on their boat I find that the performance is not there. Plus when I compare it to my stock prop I find further reason to just leave it alone. I am sure there is a science to changing prop, but I do believe that the boat manufacture did a good enough job.