A buddy of mine stores his boat in my barn and last night I happened to find him; legs sticking out over the gunnel, head buried in the battery compartment of his boat. I heard cussing and muttering well before I got close enough to determine what he was doing. As we talked he described how one of his batteries had gone bad. He had noticed over the last month or two that it was taking longer for his on board charging unit to fully recharge his trolling motor batteries and that finally he noticed it was one battery in particular that was failing to fully charge.

I shared with him how I had had the same exact experience several years ago when I had ordered a boat from the factory and the dealer had installed his brand of batteries in that boat rather than me designating what brand batteries I wanted installed.

Then I looked in his boat and immediately told him to go over to my current boat (a 2018 Ranger 521L) and look inside the battery compartment. The difference was clear. My boat had five Optima Batteries, all fully charged and ready to go.

I have been running Optima batteries for years, and except for the year that the dealer installed a different brand battery in that boat, I have been extremely happy with Optima’s performance.

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The fact is, as a touring pro; we put a tremendous amount of wear on our batteries. Long practice days followed by critical tournament days mean not only a lot of use and draining batteries to their limit before short periods of charging to get them back up to their maximum potential to repeat the process over and over again. Also, there is a lot riding on those batteries performing at their peak ability on tournament days. With my Optima batteries, I have never had a tournament day that has negatively been effected by my batteries staying power.

Now you may have noticed that I said earlier that I run five Optima Batteries in my boat. This is the first season that I have done that, and it won’t be the last. I have found that the trolling motors aren’t the only drain on batteries. If you’re like me and you run four graphs (2 Humminbird 12’s at the console and a 10” and 12” Humminbird up front) I suggest running a second Optima Battery in parallel on your cranking battery.  There is nothing more frustrating than having plenty of juice to your trolling motor, but having your graphs go out during the last hours of the day because you’ve worn down your cranking battery. This solution has worked great during this last season and I plan to continue this practice in the coming years.

My buddy wisely chose to replace his dead battery with an Optima battery and I hope for your sake, you will do the same.