The last charter I was on a year and a half ago in Key West repowered every two and half years or so at around 3000-3500 hours. They were running triple 300 vrods and had just repowered the boat we were on the month before which is how we started the conversation. As someone else mentioned, its more about running a business for them and downtime is killer, so although the engines ran fine, they swap them out to avoid any higher hour maintenance issues. they offer lots of different charters however we had chartered for blackfin tuna (which was an absolute blast) and ran offshore about 40 miles or so. I thought they ran them pretty easy. on the run out, they ran the engines around 4,500 rpm for cruise speed and I can't remember for sure but I don't recall them being shut off the entire day so lots of idle hours.
The only guys up north that are putting on a lot of hours are typically the tiller guys and few of the guides, otherwise, most guys are lucky to get more than 50 hrs a year on and I bet the average is closer to 35 or so. At the end of the day, most of us just aren't making that long of runs. I'd bet money the majority of guys fish within 6 miles of the boat dock. I might be the anomaly as it doesn't bother me to make a 20-30 mile run on way if that's where the fish are. Probably did that a 15 times this year and even with that, it looks like I'm only going to end up with about 50-60 hours for the season on the Verado; and I know I fish quite a bit more than the average guy. 1400 sounds like a bunch but on a 12 year old boat but that only averages out to a little more than 115 hours a year. as said before, the coastal guys would laugh at us, lol.
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I would actually think a 100 hours on an outboard would be more like 4,000 miles on a car if you really wanted to compare them using the same idea that 150-175k miles is starting to get up there on a car but there still likely quite a bit left and comparing that to say 3000-4000 hours on an outboard.
