Morning Dan and Welcome aboard. Most of the answers you will get here in the Cajun forum will be guesses, although some of them may be educated guesses. My advice is to go to the expert on this and run it by Todd on the "Set-ups by Todd" forum. That's all this guy does for a living and he has been there, done that, with anything you can imagine. He is also quite busy so have patience. http://www.bbcboards.net/zeroforum?id=11

Now here is my very uneducated guess: I think it would help and I think the transom would be no problem. There are props out there that like to run piercing (run so high that they are partly out of the water) and that should allow you to run WOT in some pretty shallow water.

Good Luck

DJ