Mojo Demo

Hey gang,

I'm going to demo a 2016 Mojo today and was curious if anyone had anything they wanted me to look at, observe, test, etc. Or if there was anything I should try out during my demo that I may not be aware of.

Was planning on using the Auto-Flow 2.0 settings thread for surfing, I have the full stock ballast and I brought 2 1100lb bags with me to simulate extra people.

I'm going to take tower height, interior width, storage compartment measurements to share with everyone because can't seem to find one source for that. Also going to take pics of the wake in various configurations for everyone's use.

Just let me know if there are any specifics anyone would like. Sorry for the late notice on this but hopefully some people chime in.

No request but looking forward to your review

Sent from my SM-G928V using Tapatalk

Any other boats, or just the Mojo?

Just the Mojo, been out on the water, will reply in a while

Sorry for the late reply, went out of town this weekend. I'm gonna preface this and say I'm an engineer so I may have gone overboard here...

So I went down to the dealer to crawl around in the boat for a couple hours, inspecting everything and taking measurements of the compartments. I tried to take as accurate of measurements as I could for people wondering what ballast bags will fit in there and I can put up a spreadsheet of what I measured if anyone is really interested.

Interior:

As to my thoughts on the boat, I really liked the layout of the boat and it's well thought out for storage and extra ballast. Starting from the back, the rear storage compartments are pretty large and they come with stock 650 bags. People say they are putting 1100lb bag in here but based on my measurements there's no way they are filling up as the compartment is smaller than 50x24x24. I'm sure the bags fill in all the nooks and crannies but it's just not full. One thing I did notice that alarmed me was even the stock bags, at 20" wide were pressing against the engine panel dividers and causing them to bow, they were almost touching the spark plugs. I can imagine anything large would be touching them, and the divider panel bracing is most definitely required here. I wish there were some bags that weren't as wide but taller because there's 31" to the top of the compartment. I do like how there's an opening to the seats going forward so you can put some stepped down bags.

Moving forward, to the main cabin. I love the sliding rear seat, the rails seem solid and it feels as solid as something on rails can. I didn't realize at first but the rear seat back kit can be mounted underneath the sliding seat in a configuration that doesn't poke out and allows it to be slid around without hitting the transmission access box. I didn't realize this was a feature and it was nice because i thought I was going to have to store the seat back when not in use. The seat back kits are a little wobbly as they are an adapter into an adapter but I think they're a great feature to have. Based on their construction, they aren't worth $900, but if you want them, that's what you gotta pay. I do like the marquetta fabric as it feels a little more durable than the flat vinyl which retained marks from items being sat on them for quite a long time before they returned to shape.

Removing the seats from their panels, they are kinda lightweight but this is a price point boat. The seats are about 17.5" deep so you're sitting position in them is going to be kinda upright compared to a wider seat. The compartment openings are also very small, at only 12" so it's going to be next to impossible to store any boards down underneath the seats as they are only 14.25" deep. This also limits some ballast bags you can put in there as well. The 370lb tube sac should fit great.

The seat bases themselves are unfortunately pretty thin fiberglass and when sitting on the seat and bouncing or moving around that area squeaked quite a bit. I can only think that after some years of some big guys sitting on this it could cause issues, but idk. The area I'm talking about is right below the cup holder/speaker part of the opening and what's interesting I found is that on the starboard side there is a plastic brace under the middle of that section so it squeaks considerably less, but on the port side, (which has the longer span), there is no brace. Now I'm not sure if that boat was just missing it or what but I felt it an odd engineering choice. The floor is 39.5" (between the rails) by 63" to the drivers seat. The usable interior space is 73.5" from vinyl to vinyl. I found this kinda disappointing for a 100" beam boat, but the gunwhale is pretty thick as are the seat backs.

I do not like the non-skid flooring and the non-skid walkthrough material. When it gets wet, it almost kinda stains and requires some maintenance to be clear again. I do like the walkthrough very much though. Kinda forces people to go there and with the rear seat slid forward, they step on the transmission cover and not on your vinyl. I will most likely opt for carpet in mine if I get one.

The boat I was looking at had the Aviator tower on it, which I really do like. It's solid as a rock and easy to raise/lower. I don't really think the S-bend tower is worth it for the price difference, but it does come pre-drilled for extra board racks. I plan on adding Roswell swivel board racks and the only place I can see to put them is after the tower starts to angle back towards the rear so when you're moving boards around the bindings don't hit the bindings of the boards on the bottom rack. This poses a slight problem with your tower speakers depending on choice because the Roswell Mag Swivel rack only has the open and closed position, not middle, and depending on your speaker, it may not lock into place. The finger tips appear rubberized so I wouldn't expect any damage to the speakers though.

Speaking of the tower, I see these questions asked often. The tower height from the floor of the boat is 75.25. The width across at the bottom is 84 and width at the top to mount speakers is 61.5. The tower folded down with the board racks folded in is higher than with the racks folded out because they angle up when folded, and a lot of people might not have the width to put the tower in a storage space with the racks open. The top of the rack folded in is the highest point on the tower when folded down and I measured 105" to the floor sitting on the stock smaller wheels.

I like the dash layout and the plugs for USB/Aux line up on the side where you'd rest your phone. The screen is nice and the fact that it's monochrome hopefully means it's not too expensive to replace but it's a little awkward when driving to press the buttons because the steering wheel kinda gets in the way of your view and it feels kinda awkward driving and going through the menus. The dash itself is fairly cheap, mostly plastic but it didn't seem to rattle around much. The fiberglass wall where the arm rest and throttle are mounted is pretty thin but it's solid enough I think. The Axis panel in comparison is plastic that rattles a good bit. Underneath the dash is plenty of leg/dog room but it may not be the best idea to have them sit there if you have a sub installed.

Moving over to the observer seat, I wish it was a true flip up but you have to remove the seat base and then flip the back up to get access and you're not squeezing much in there without doing both steps. I do like there's a board to mount battery switchers, chargers, amps, etc and that is a nice design consideration. The storage goes forward to front seats and there may be enough room in there for a wakeboard but you're most likely going to be storing 4 packs of orange CGA vests for the 17 people the boat holds.

The stock plug and play bow bag is 500lb but based on the width of the Mojo vs the Craz I think you can fix the Sumo 750 bag in there just fine. There's not too much space at the tip of the bow to fit anything but I small box anchor but that's probably what I was going to put in there anyways. One of the ballast lines comes out of the bag there, so you need to be careful with placement of your anchor. With the plug and play bag, you really have no room for storage in that compartment and idk why you'd not use it so that's pretty much shot for storage concerns.

More thoughts in the next post.

Driving/Riding:

So unfortunately I had to rush my interior review a little towards the end and missed some measurements but the day was getting late and I had to get it out on the water. Also unfortunately the wind had decided to pick up and the lake was super choppy at that point. This didn't allow for great boarding conditions but did give me some time to evaluate it rough water conditions. I wanted to drive it unweighted, stock ballast, then loaded down with 2 1100lb bags full to simulate extra ballast/people. I only had time to do the first two however, so I'm to do that later.

Now I'm coming from a Mastercraft Prostar 205 Direct Drive with the LT1 motor propped down, so this driving this was quite different to say the least. I really liked how when you set the cruise (this was Digital Cruise Pro btw) and set the trim plate all the way down and slammed the throttle forward that it would take off, accelerate, get a few mph from speed, slow down and basically come to speed near perfectly without overshooting and the trim plate would automatically go back up. I can forsee many people forgetting this otherwise. It works well lowering it once you're back up to speed if you have some serious bow rise but for wakeboarding and surfing, I'd leave it up. Turns were pretty tight but not quite as tight as my 20ft DD obviously, though I didn't push it. It felt stable in the turns and didn't roll that much and held speed, but in order for it to maintain speed, the engine was screaming so I wouldn't recommend taking too tight of turns with the cruise engaged if you don't need to.

I rode through the heavy chop and tried to hit some double ups to see how things felt in the boat. It handled it like a champ for the most part. My dad was riding in the bow and for him being 60+ he said it wasn't bad being up there, except for this one roller I must have caught just right which kind of jarred him. He didn't get much spray up there even as windy as it was. Going over my own rollers, the boat well stable and didn't sound noisy. I've been in plenty of Axis that felt like the floor was shaking going over rollers and the Mojo felt solid.

I tried to get some pics of the wake at different speeds but we kept having issues with the paddle wheel offset so I'm not entirely sure what speeds was what on the pictures and I was trying to use my phone GPS as a baseline but it was jumping around. We finally realized too late that we couldn't get a surf wave for crap because this lake is super shallow. It's 11ft at the deepest and the relatively flat area we found to ride was 6ft. Now I have no doubts the boat can surf as I got the Craz to work just fine on stock ballast in 25ft water, but the surf review will have to come at a later date. One thing we noticed and I'm not sure if it was due to the wind, or a issue with the paddle wheel offset or what, but when trying to surf, 11mph felt and looked like 9mph, and the phone GPS confirmed that. Setting it to 14mph however looked and felt like 14mph. I could never find the sweet spot where the speed was accurate but we gave up once we realized the depth was a major issue. I'll revist that later too.

I wanted to wakeboard with stock ballast and then put the 1100s in the cabin and bow but I ran out of time for that so I only got to use the stock ballast completely full (including bow sac). Now this was my first time riding since November and the water wasn't anywhere near flat so it wasn't perfect conditions for testing to say the least. I tried my best though. My dad has some pics of me riding next to the wake but I don't have those pics yet. I'll work on trying to get them. I rode at 22mph and I felt the wake was honestly not that great as I was hoping. I usually run my boat at 2400lb of ballast and 22.5 and it's very poppy. I thought for the size of this boat plus ballast the wake would be just as good if not more. I was kinda expecting to get boosted off the wake but maybe it was a combo of the chop and my rusty riding but it just didn't feel as poppy. I got used to riding the wake on an A24 at the end of last season and when you hit that it feels like an angel just descended and lifts you up and you have no choice but to get some serious air.

I know I plan on swapping the ballast out anyways for larger bags, and I don't know if riding in sub 7ft of water affects the wakeboard wake like it does the surf wake, so maybe it's not a fair comparison, but I didn't love the stock wake in this test. I will be demoing again before I buy and I'm going to put the 1100lb bags in the rear compartments and throw some extra weight in the cabin to simulate more people and I'll update my review then. To be clear, I didn't hate the wake, I rode at 70ft and I didn't feel it was too wide, it felt pretty good, it was solid and had a good height, it just wasn't what I was used to boosting off of. Maybe after I ride a few more times this season and get the kinks worked out and find some flat water, I'll change my opinion.

Sorry for the absurdly long review, but I like to be through. I think that covers just about everything I tested out. If I think of anything else I'll add it, and if anyone has any questions I'll try and answer. Also if there's anything anyone wants me to check out next time let me know.

Pretty stoked on your review with how detailed it was, thank you. Even more stoked to join Skiers Choice and make some memories. Seems like anytime I get to demo a boat the water is always CRAP and it's really hard to tell the wake let alone just ride. Enjoyed the read...

1. The salesman must have thought you were crazy.
2. Awesome review. Thank you

We came to a lot of the same conclusions on many aspects of the boat. I feel like most of the downsides that you pointed out are corrected at the Supra level (which makes me a little sick to my stomach) but even still so ... they don't seem to be big negatives.

You mentioned spending a lot of time in an A24 ... are you shopping those two boats against one another? Those were 2 of the few I was looking at.

I walked in and told the salesman, I'm an engineer, I'll be a while...haha

I figure the minor issues with the seat bases being thin could be fixed by myself with some supports I fabricated on my own if I was really worried about it. I don't think that's gonna be a deal breaker. The dash area is not heavy duty, I just hope it doesn't loosen and rattle over time. Anyone with an older Moomba care to chime in about areas that started to weaken/rattle down the road?

A friend of mine is the Malibu/Axis dealer in the area and he has an A24 that I spent a lot of time on towards the end of last season. It puts out an amazing wakeboard wake. It's too much for me with the wedge down right now. I was not floored by the Mojo in comparison but I didn't have the bigger sacs in there, hope to correct that soon. Right now I'm debating between the Mojo, a Mastercraft NXT 22, and an Axis T23/A22. I had demo'd a Craz last year but the MSRP difference was only $3500 and I was like, that's nothing at this price level and the extra bow width(and rubber steps), coupled with the extra foot in the main cabin really makes a difference in terms of room, that I decided it's worth it to spend a little more.

I crawled around in the NXT 22 last weekend and I loved the build quality, it's so well put together and they thought of everything, down to rubber tips on exposed screws under the deck. Whereas the Moomba had exposed screws you could poke yourself with. Oddly enough with it being a narrower beam the interior width is a whole 7" wider than the Mojo. I haven't lake tested it yet, but that's the plan in the next week or so.

Great review man, I enjoyed reading about your details.

You need a deeper lake to water test on LOL. I would think 6-7ft is too shallow for a good wake board wake loaded as the boat will be sitting about 4ft under water at idle.

As for the quality over time, on my 13 Mojo, granted it only has 230hrs due to a bad season last year and only getting 35hr on the engine.
Nothing squeaks in my boat, I notice the same flex in the panel by my cabin cup holders but its never been an issue and we have a lot of people in the boat most of the time.

The dash doesn't rattle even with my 15 sub under it. Now I have had to replace almost all the nuts in the dash with Nylock nuts so they won't loosen.

We have hit some pretty serious rollers and beat on the boat a little when at Powell and those tour boats pass you in the narrow areas, only thing you can do is hit the throttle and go over their wakes, pretty hard hits on a couple but nothing happened to the boat.

I personally think the Mojo is a really solid boat, coming from my 08 LSV my 13 is hands down a more solid feeling and quieter boat in general.