I have been experimenting with a holeshot plate and skid planner for the last few months. I have tested with it in several different configurations: Hole shot plate parallel to the bottom of the jackplate, holeshote plate angled down,with and without wedges, big and small holeshot plates, with and without the skid planner, full gas, light gas, lower pitch props, and high pitch props. About the only thing I didn't test was loaded livewell.
In all the testing I found that on my boat a holeshot plate really doesn't do anything unless I'm running a 32 or higher pitched prop. A small plate that just larger than the jackplate did nothing, the skid planner out performed it and combining both didn't make a difference. The skid planner does it job until I put on the big wheels. With the big wheels and a large holeshot plate parallel to the jackplate I saw a little improvement. The real pickup came with a large holeshot plate angled down to push the nose down. Unfortunately when angled down the plate catches water at high speeds and starts to push the nose down around 90. The boat never felt unsafe, it just kept me from running over 90. My hope was that the plate would be fixed in place, but I had to take the Bailey approach and put it on an actuator to get it out of the way at speed.
Taking the clever Bailey approach I designed a large pivoting holeshot plate.
A big thanks goes to Steve Glenn at Hydrodynamics for all his support. It took me several weeks to model the back of the boat and his plate. Every time I thought I could get away without details I would run into an interference issue in the 3d model and ask him for more details on his plate. Many times late at night I would text him asking for more dimensions and he always responded. Great guy and plate. Thanks to Jay as well for helping take photos and videos of the back of the boat so I could see what was going on. Much of the work on this was done 1000 miles away from the boat. Jay ran over to the place I was storing the boat and took measurements if I needed something and also assisted in some crazy video taking trying to see what was going on with the plate at speed.
Hydrodynamics built a 12" plate with 2 degree of tuck and a few other tweaks to allow packaging of all the gizmos. In total I'm running 12.5" of setback around 3/4" to 1" over the pad. All the above testing was done at 10.5" of setback. FYI, I personally found no noticeable improvement going from 10.5" to 12.5". The additional setback was for the packaging the actuator only.
I plan to test in the morning. I have a 34 pitch bolted on ready to go!!