Lake Livin' requires a boat

And thru my happenings on the lake I have decided that the only way to do it right is via a pontoon boat. I have ridden in many boats over the years on the lake. When you want to entertain and relax, the only way to do it right is a pontoon. Sure, Uncle Roman may ask if you are gonna retake Omaha Beach but Suck My Wake can't hold 10 people and pump out 700 watts of music that will run off almost any Houstonite holed up in a cove. Sure, power boats are neat. But after a while, the noise and the fact that you can't hold a drink steady gets to you. Not to mention that they drink gas about as fast as my friends can drink beer. A pontoon boat was just the most conducive to our lifestlye aside from a 134mph Party Cat. That $400,000 is kind of intimidating so a pontoon it is. Since purchasing the boat I have been doing extensive work on it to get it to Lake Livin standards. The first thing the boat needed was a stereo capable of running off Houstonite cove dwellers that think they own the lake. To accomplish this task I needed some serious fire power. A little bit of project management would be needed for this task. First I needed to get the wiring up to par. This system would need several amps, meaning that the one battery would not suffice. Not to mention that you NEVER run the radio or much else of anything off the battery for starting. Why you ask? Because how the hell are you gonna start the boat if you ran it down listening to 50 cent you dumb Houstonite! I decided I need some serious battery storage, I looked into some Optima deep cycles but they were just to pricey. I ended up going with a pair of Stowaway's from Academy. These batteries provided twice the amount the Optimas did at half the cost. I now have 230 amp hours worth of charge. For you dumb Houstonites that means that I can run nearly amps of draw for 20 hrs before the batteries hit the danger zone. To control the flow of current I enlisted Perko to do the job. They make a nice dual battery switch that is perfect for the job. You can pick which battery runs the boat. When starting I use both batteries and head out to where I am needing to go. This allows all three batteries to be charged. When I drop anchor and shut off the engines I switch over to the secondary batteries to run the stereo. Depending on amp draw of the amps some amps will be shut off. A high output alternator will be installed soon in order to fill the batteries faster when underway. All power wiring was done with 4 gauge. I used a 12 circuit distribution panel to run all the new accesories. Next on the wiring project was to scope out all the speaker wiring. This became a bit harder than expected because I was not only wiring for the HU speakers but for the amps as well. I ended up using nearly every bit of the 200ft of wire I purchased. I believe I am going to put in a 6 channel x-over because the HU only does a so-so job with the built in x-over. I would like to fine tune it a bit more. Especially when I run the 5 pairs of dome tweeters in the roof. Once the speaker wires were laid I began to install the Head Unit, this was pretty straight forward except that I had hard wired the illumination circuit which required the HU to be completely disconnected which mean all settings are lost. So a quick unsoldering would have to be done to correct that oversight. All connection were soldered to ensure connectivity. Boats bounce a lot more than cars ya dumb Houstonites Next up were the speakers. This took a while also because I had to make panels for most all of the speakers except for two. There were two in the rear that ran off the HU and two up front. Then I installed 4 underneath the deck, 2 in front and 2 in the rear. These were wired in series and run off an Alpine 2 channel. These kick ass when you are swimming because the music is all underneath the boat and you can hear it pretty well down there. I am planning on adding some Aura bass shakers in the seats so you can get a little more bass underneath. The 6x8's were a bust. They are the speakers running off the HU up front. I am not sure why they aren't working. I need to run some tests on those. Also up front area a pair of 6.5's and 5.25's running off a 4 channel amp. There is a 12inch sub in the drivers seat being pushed by a mono Nakamichi amp. As mentioned before I am planning on installed 5 pairs of tweeters in the roof for some more headroom. It's rather muddy because the speakers are all in the floor seats. The tweeters will be run off another 2 channel Alpine amp I have sitting around. I plan on getting a few 4 channels or 6 channels to try and consolidate amps. but I want to keep plenty of amps around because it's easier to control what is running and what is not. Right now I can turn on only the underdeck speakers and HU and draw little power. If I had only a 6 and 4 channel running everything there would be a lot of amp draw and very little control. I will probably try and pick up another 2 channel and 4 channel Alpine. The next project will be mounting new gauges and switches for everything. But due to some other project, it is on the back burner.