I’ll keep this post pretty short, but I was compelled to make a record of my first impressions of the new two-stroke Yamaha 15-horsepower outboard engine.  It’s just a small outboard, right?  Yeah, it is - but I’ve always liked very small boats and motors since they can literally go anywhere and that’s what makes boating fun to me.

This is the first Yamaha outboard I’ve owned.  I would have preferred to own a two-stroke Mercury or Evinrude, but none were to be found.  That’s right, they’re all gone forever.  I have a new Johnson 9.9 sitting in my closet, but I needed more power than that.  Since Yamaha is still producing two-stroke engines, I ordered a 15HP engine through a friend on Scream And Fly’s message board.

:: The 15HP Yamaha had much more power than I expected ::

When the time came to order my new Carolina Skiff, I hesitated to order the new JV13, even though it was a much better boat in every aspect over the J-series boats.  While the JV has better hull, and quite frankly looks much nicer with its Boston Whaler-like looks, the JV13 is about 100 pounds heavier than the J12.  That’s a lot of extra weight.  I went back and forth, thinking that the little 15HP outboard may not be enough to power the heavier JV13, but in the end I decided to take the chance that it would be - and it is.

A few days ago when I launched the new boat I could immediately feel that the Yamaha had much more power than my previously-owned 9.9 Mercury two-stroke engine. This surprised me since the Mercury had a displacement advantage over the Yamaha.  By the time the break-in schedule permitted me to plane the boat, I was surprised how effortlessly the boat planed, and a small burst of full throttle left me in amazement.  Yeah, we’re talking about a small outboard here.  If someone told me this was a 20HP engine, I would have believed them.  Even more interesting, this Yamaha sounds exactly like the 1986 Evinrude 4HP I had when I was younger. Freaky, but in a good way.

So there it is, I’m impressed and very pleased with the performance of this engine.