Hello, my name is Jeffrey, and I work with Hobie. We're in the Hobie booth at ICAST and what we're looking at is the Hobie Mirage Pro Angler 12. It's the boat that won Best Boat at ICAST, and it also won Best of Show. It's a boat where we had a 14 foot version of this boat a couple years ago, so the 12 footer is new. It has a couple new features, but what it shares with a lot of our other kayaks and the Mirage Pro Angler 14 is it's a pedal-driven boat, so I'll pop this drive out.
What this is, this is a Mirage Drive and it is a foot-propelled propulsion system. So you're peddling along, these are like a fish's fin, so when you're in shallow water they're right up against the bottom of the boat, and when you're peddling along it propels you really efficiently and now your hands are free. So what this boat offers is it offers foot propulsion, a lot of stability, a ton of storage space and a lot of comfort.
The storage space we'll start with, a huge front hatch. Back behind the seat there is a really big cargo area. A lot of accessories that we sell that can go back there or any fishing tackle you want to put back here.
The boat's really nice and wide. You can actually stand up on the Mirage Pro Anglers. This whole area up in front is all standing room. There's a center hatch right here that opens up and it presents some Plano tackle storage, a little mesh gear spot for pliers or any little goodies that you want to put in there.
This is called the Vantage Seat, and what the seat is it's a 3D mesh so it's really nice and comfortable. It has integrated arm rests, and it's completely adjustable. So what we did, this is sitting now in its low position. If we want to lift this seat up, we actually just lift up on the back, and we've just lifted the back of the seat about five inches. These adjusters integrated into the armrest actually can adjust and bring your seat bottom up, your seat back, you can bring it forward more or put it back.
Right back here we have a Boa system. So a lot of shoes have had these, some boots have had these. I can actually tighten this up, and I can change the lumbar, so it's real nice and soft right now and if I want to add some tension I just tighten down that Boa and it adds a bunch of lumbar support to the back of the seat. So now we're up and high. It changes the angle of how you can peddle. You can see out in front of the boat. If you're sight fishing, if you're going to be standing up a lot, it's nice to have the seat in this position. You can get up and down a lot easier.
The steering on the boat is actually on this handle, and you can see as I move it, on the other side of the boat, there's also a second steering control, so I can switch the handle to either side of the boat and make adjustments with the rudder that's in the back.
Other than that, on the bottom of the boat, what we did to try to make it easier if you're going to be installing a fish finder, this is, if we were to flip the boat over, integrated into the bottom. So it's a Lowrance ready transducer mount. We mount our transducer in here, and it's actually going to be safe so you're going to be able to ride the boat right up on the beach or anything. It's not going to hurt the transducer and it's going to be in the water, so it's going to get temperature readings, and it's going to make the install of your transducer a lot easier. This is going to come up, and we have these neat little fittings, so no longer do you have to drill holes in the boat to mount the transducer.
When you bring your transducer up, these big mounting boards on the side of the boat are what you're going to be screwing it into, so any other rod holders that you want to put on the boat, any fish finders or GPS’s just get mounted onto these boards and they're a sacrificial board, so if you make a mistake or if you want to change your setup a little bit later, you can just buy new boards and it's no holes in your boat.
Then when we take a look down here, we see also our horizontal rod storage, and I can pop open this front hatch, and you can see the large front hatch, and there's a little bucket in here that you can take out. You can see the horizontal rod tubes that come all the way forward and protect your rods.
One of the other features that this boat has that's new for this year is if you want to run an anchor trolley kit down the side of the boat, on both sides, front and back there are integrated, molded in inserts. So when you install your anchor trolley kit, there's no holes to drill or anything. You just screw the blocks right into the boat and it's ready to go and it should make the installation a lot easier.
I think that's about it. Thanks for stopping by and checking out the Hobie Mirage Pro Angler 12.