New Battery Charger

My favorite place in Colorado to fish is Lake Granby. It's a beautiful lake with huge lake trout. I usually vertically jig in 80+ feet of water. The depth makes using an anchor not really practical, plus who wants to fiddle with an anchor. A few years ago I bought a Minnkota trolling motor with iPilot. The iPilot is pretty cool. It's GPS enabled and can do all sorts of neat things. The killer feature it has is a virtual anchor. You can tell it to hold a position for you and it will keep you right in that spot. So when I'm on Granby I use this feature for 6-8 hours in a day. This can really eat up your batteries. Especially on windy days. To keep the trolling motor running strong for a whole day I have wired two 12v Optima deep cycle batteries in parallel (my trolling motor is 12v). This will last the whole day, but the batteries need charging at the end of the day. I used to carry a 10 amp charger with me. This was just kind of a pain in the butt. I decided to make life easier and bought an on-board battery charger. The charger is smart and looks at temperature and current voltage to work out how and if it will charge the battery. This will allow the batteries to charge quickly and safely.

Today I did the install. I found some 5/16" thick rubber standoffs to put between the boat and charger to help with vibration. I used 1/4" hardware with fender and lock washers plus locktite. Hopefully the install will hold up to all the vibration and banging around. Here are a few pictures.