If you were going to buy a new truck for fishing and hauling your boat would you get a new 4WD or a 2WD and why.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of each type of truck.
PS: I wish that they made a truck that got 50 mpg and had a 4WD option. But that's just a pipe dream right now.
I'll go first:
For me I would love to have a 4WD truck that I could use to get back into some holes that only have dirt or gravel roads leading back to them. And I'd like to be more secure at the launch ramp knowing that I could just about always pull my boat out of the water at any lauch ramp.
But with the gas prices recently going up over $4 /gallon again it makes me stop and thing about the gas milegage that 4WD vehicles get and how much money I'd be spending every time I filled the tank up.
My current small truck still only gets about 20 MPG as it's really old and the engine is worn. It's not leaking oil enough to notice but over time the piston and rings are not getting the compression that they did when they were new. I found the original sticker on the truck as I had saved it and it said the truck should be getting 21 to 26 mpg or in that range. I wonder if the gasoline we buy today has the same formula as what we bought 30 years ago? I know that they change the formula in the summer months to counter act the Ozone Pollution that comes from burning gasoline. Each year the refineries switch over from the winter blend to the summer blend so that tells me that they are formulating the gas differently these days during the hot summer months.
What I'll probably end up getting is a small truck if they still make them these days. Toyota, Nissan are the only two that I know of right now that make the smaller pickup trucks. The Tacoma and the Frontier are the only two smaller trucks that I could find. I saw a Chevy Colorado the other day and I think that they still make them for 2013 but it's called a medium PU truck. I just need a PU truck with an open back so that I can walk from the boat though the trucks bed and then jump out on dry land without getting my shoes wet when I recover my boat. Other than that and blocking the view when backing down the ramp I won't be putting a camper shell on the truck like I did in the past. My old camper shell was stolen right out of my drive way in 2009 when I was recovering from a heart attack in the hospital. Someone drove up into the drive way at my house and loaded up my camper shell and took off with it. It was sitting on the concrete at the side of the house. Some people have a lot of balls. I guess they took it for the value of the aluminum as it was pretty old and was missing a rear window and a side window. The rear window had been kicked out when a neighborhood kid was roller blading on my drive way and decided to kick the window out with his skate. Another neighborhood kid ratted on him and that's how I found out who did the dirty deed. That sliding glass window was going to cost well over $100 to replace. I was in the process of finding an alternative cheaper window when the camper shell went missing.
I was planning on using the camper shell for some future camping trips. Oh well I'm getting too hold for tent camping these days anyway. I just hope they enjoy the camper shell or the money.
On the opposite side of the fence I lost a camo bag that fell out of my truck on the way home from the fishing hole a few weeks back. Someone found it and called me to tell me that they found it in the middle of the road. It had my Fox Pro and Johnny Stewart electronic game callers in the bag and they were worth about $350 together. So he was nice enough to return them and even rejected a reward that I offered to him. But the same day I also lost a $300 Garmin eTrex Vista hand held GPS unit with all my fishing way points on it. That one hurts the most. I replaced that unit with a new one and I had all my way points backed up. So if I find someone fishing all my old fishing spots I'll wonder if they are the one who found my old gps unit! I have digital maps and all the accessories for that unit and might be interested in selling them to someone.
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. Also MPG just sucked for me...8-9mpg when I pulled the boat. Other problem was on steep ramps, icy ramps and some of the ramps that are not kept up to park standards.....just always had nightmares of sliding into the water....Charlestown ramp is very slippery all year...