CONTINUOUSWAVE

Recently we spent a week at an interesting lake. The lake is surrounded by very steep hills and impressive mountains, and there are shoreline stretches for several miles where there is no coastal road due to the terrain. The settlements, villages, private homes, resorts, and hotels in those areas rely on operators of small water taxis to provide transportation. The boats are a commercial application of outboard engines. I made the following observations:

All the water taxis use modern four-stroke-power-cycle engines. I did not see a single two-stroke-power-cycle engine in use on any water taxi. The hulls are probably all from the same mold. They are about 30-feet Panga-type hulls, with a relatively flat bottom aft. A cabin superstructure helps to add strength and provides some spray protection to the paying passengers. The hull form at the bow has a moderately deep-V, and the hull has large chines to deflect spray. When going into head seas, these boats will pound. Knowledgeable passengers know to move as far aft as possible to get a more comfortable ride.

The predominant engine power was 150-HP. Even with a full boat load of passengers, a 150-HP will get the panga hull on plane and produce decent cruising speed.

The engine of choice was overwhelmingly the Mercury FOURSTROKE 150-HP SeaPro commercial engine. I saw it on almost every water taxi. There were perhaps one or two SUZUKI powered boats, and maybe one Yamaha. No Honda engines, no Evinrude engines, no Tohatsu or Nissan engines. The taxi fleet was 95-percent Mercury SeaPro FOURSTROKE.

These engines get a workout. The fleet starts operating about 7 a.m. Many people use it to get to work. There are two modes of operation: in the public mode, the boats work like a public bus, running a route and picking up any passengers available. After about 10 a.m. traffic slows down. Sometimes the taxis will shut down their engine and just drift, waiting for a fare to come down to a dock and hail them visually with a waving of hands overhead. About 4 p.m. traffic increases, and people are coming from the larger villages to their homes. Traffic continues well into the evening, with people often hiring a taxi in private mode, to take just themselves or perhaps one or two others to a destination; prices are negotiated.

When the lanchas are working as a public bus, a ride between adjacent villages costs about $1.50 for out-of-town tourists. The locals pay half that. As often happens, some shady operators will try to soak the tourists. A fellow offered his boat to us for a short trip for $15, or ten times the going rate.

Great pic, observation. and explanation.

I doubt you'd see Nissan outboards since they stopped selling outboards in 2014 and focused more in the smaller HP ranges. Nissan outboards were rebadged Tohatsu motors. Tohatsu now has an agreement with Honda and starting in 2014 all Tohatsu motors over 115 are rebadged Honda outboards.

The Panga boat was an original design by Yamaha in the early 1970s and part of a World Bank project. They are known for durability and easily beached and launched from beaches all around the world. The have great weight carrying capacity and perform well with lower power compared to other boats.

Were you stateside or out of country? Sounds like it was an out of country trip.

D-

We were at Lago Atitlan in Guatemala, quite a spectacular location. The lake is about 18 x 8 kilometers and over 300-meters deep. It is in the caldera of a very ancient collapsed volcano. Elevation about 1,500-meters.

Water only flows into Lago Atitlan, coming down from the surrounding mountains. There is no outflow. The lake level varies quite a bit from year to year, depending on rainfall. The ecology of the lake looks threatened. We saw signs of algae blooms, and this was in the winter or dry season. An endorheic lake like Atitlan can accumulate pollutants over time, as water only leaves by evaporation, and whatever is carried into the lake remains behind. With more development and more people living around the lake, there may be serious problems ahead if some efforts are not made to reduce runoff from the land with associated contamination.

This area in Guatemala is populated by Maya people, and they are quite distinct from the usual population of Central America, which is mostly Mestizo. They continue to speak their own languages--dozens of them--as well as Spanish. About 40-percent of Guatemala's people are of indigenous Maya descent, but in the region around Lake Atitlan they are particularly concentrated.

To get back to outboard engines, the surprise for me was seeing so many modern four-stroke-power-cycle outboard engines. Usually we see 20-year-old two-stroke-power-cycle outboards, predominantly Yamaha brand (or other Japanese brands), when travelling outside the USA.

Also, the local fishers use very small, very crude wooden boats that they paddle with one oar. They mainly fish close to shore, as I suspect the water is fantastically deep everywhere else.