What would you do to make your Epic 'better'?
I've got a few things that I'd like to do to make my life a little easier. What kind of things are you thinking of? Maybe together we can come up with a shopping list of sorts that would make our Epics a little more habitable. Here's a few things to get the bidding started. Some may be a bit more pie in the sky than others ;-)
1. Raise the driver's seat by two to three inches. The seat is super comfy with lots of lumbar support and awesome two-stage foam, but when towing, I'm usually sitting on a throwable float so the nose is right on the horizon (or so). I looked at it some this weekend and although it'd be possible to do pretty well by just adding some tube brackets between base and slides, it could be done awesome with a little extra work (make the base taller). OTOH, it's nice to be forced to have that throwable within arm's reach like we're supposed to.
2. Cigarette lighter plugs in the trunk and on the passenger side of the cockpit. If you use v-drive bags, you could fill both sides up at once, and for a trunk bag, it's a pain to have someone connect/disconnect the pump while you're standing on the swim step.
3. More lights. Lights in the v-drive and engine compartments and the cubby (port side of the walkway) all run off the "Storage" light switch that controls the trunk light. Would also be great to have some lights in the under-seat storage, glove box, and the shelf where the driver stores all his stuff. I'd also like to have an overhead light - could be cool to use a custom battery-powered removable one that will flood the cockpit with light when needed. How 'bout poker night on the lake?
4. Line-X and/or removeable carpet in the trunk. One of the big nuisances for me is drying out the trunk carpet, which gets wet from water sloshing up while decelerating, from wet life jackets & wakeboards and from loading it with a 750-pound sack. I thought simple Line-X treatment in there would be great, but there would still be exposed hardware from the swim platform, the aft light, the tie down points, etc. Might be cooler to just model a removable (multipiece) carpet insert for the trunk. Form-fit the pieces, maybe one horizontal one and also a wrap-around vertical piece. Would be nice if the bottom one was rubber-backed/molded and if the upper ones were velcro'd or held in with snaps or magnets or something. When you get home, you just empty the trunk, pull the carpet inserts out to hang and wipe out the trunk to dry.
5. Rubber backed/molded carpet inserts for the cockpit and walkway. Lack of removeable carpet is one big deficit IMHO. By sandwiching the OEM carpet between upper hull and liner, they complicated carpet replacement for us for sure. If a really nice rubber-molded carpet insert was available, we could renovate our Epics without really dealing with the problem and it might make things easier on us in terms of drying the boats after a day on the lake (pull the carpet out and hang dry or scrub, or whatever. Has anyone replaced their carpet or checked out how the carpet's wedged between the two?
6. Replace the hatch lock mechanism with one more like an automobile hood. Pull the t-handle and the hatch is forcibly raised a couple inches so you can reach under the hatch and release the second latch to raise it. As it is now, our options are electric hatch (cool but expensive and bad in case of electrical problem), and the stock method of pulling the t-handle while at the same time trying to lift the hatch - what a pain. I 've kicked around the problem since about the time I bought the boat. It's VERY important that the hatch isn't able to open while at-speed either on the water or trailer.
7. Removable tow-pylon on the v-drive engine hatch. Right now the thing's always up and in the way even though we only use it once a year on average. I don't think there's room to make it retractable, but there may be a way to make it easily removeable.
8. Removable hard top for the bow. Still think this would be so awesome to have - a gelcoated fiberglass tonneau cover for the bow area that locks down securely without scratching anything. This would be great to use during the cold seasons and would even be cool when storing it or for those that either run with small crews or live on the water. Not sure if you'd want it to be strong enough to walk on, but even that probably wouldn't be too difficult to do. Turn your open-bow into a closed-bow temporarily.
9. Great over-the-tower boat cover. To be great, it's got to be waterproof, vented and should stand up to UV for years, should cover most of the trailer, and should be easy for one guy to get on and off and to clean. Canvas would be the old school solution but I wonder if there's a newer-age fabric that might do a better job without the added strain of being such a heavy material. This would make my life so much easier - regular tarps wont even last a year where I'm at and both sun and water can damage a boat in a heartbeat. Oh yeah, it'd sure be nice if this was inexpensive.
10. Fiberglass bimini. I really wanted to do this but it's not the cheapest, low-risk project. I'd like a color-matched fiberglass hardtop that mounts on top of the tower with much more size and clearance than the OEM trampoline top but would still allow the use of the tower tow (over the top of the hardtop like my bimini does), use regular board racks on the sides of the tower, and the thing should be trailerable in-place. There may be an option to integrate a few speakers into the trailing edge, and the thing should be removable with simple tools. Of course it will have to be tolerant of our twisted tower tops and should have a great alignment procedure for install.
Any comments would be appreciated, and I'd love to hear your ideas.
