Tinbender,
Congrads on your new ride!
The average boater only adds 150-200 engine hours per year (pretty sad, huh?). Assuming your main engines are out of warranty, can you guess how many annual engine hours you’ll be adding? Would the extra hours be significant to the next buyer of a 2006 boat? Most engines ‘rust out before they wear out.’
Having a method for a person overboard to re-board without assistance is a great safety feature (or maybe required, I’m not sure). If you store the Armstrong dive ladder pointing upwards while underway, a MOB can reach it from the water, reverse the position to a dive ladder, and climb back aboard without any help. The floatation in the ladder makes it a bit tougher, but we’ve both practiced and can do it easily. You would lose this option if you mounted a kicker in that area. You’d want to find an alternative MOB boarding option. Using the cowling tilt switch to raise the lower leg to the point where you could sit on it, and then majestically rise out of the water and somehow clamber over the kicker does not sound graceful enough for me to be interested.
Other downsides are loss of room storing a kicker and its’ separate gas container as well as dangers of refueling in the boat. Gas may continue to be cheap, and you could buy a lot of gas by selling the two kickers.
We use the method rstinge1 describes for minimum-wake displacement cruising at 3.5-8 MPH with one engine down and off. For doing 8 MPH on 10 MPH-limit canals you can keep the wake on the levee side. Credit to Discovery crew, who described this to minimize fuel needs between long legs on a vast SE Alaska cruise. We get over 6 MPG this way, depending of course on engine, props, loading etc. Yamaha reports same numbers (6.7 mpg @ 1,000rpm with twin F150’s on a Worldcat 27...likely even better at 650 vs 1,000 RPM).
My Yamaha tech is fine with long days under 1800 RPM, as long as I ‘open it up to WOT before coming back in the marina.’
So to answer your query, I have not installed a kicker but offer some reasons not to unless the single engine idle alternative doesn’t make you crazy happy like it does me. I’m sure the kicker option would be even more efficient despite the potential minor downsides.
Half the fun of boating and cruising is finding and customizing what works best for you and your crew! You don’t have to find that in your first season with your boat, but still max out your ‘adventure before dementia.’
81 degrees and sunny today, but in just 6 weeks the days start getting longer!
Cheers!
John