Anglapro Escapade 554 Elite with Yamaha 130hp

If you are after a Brisbane-built aluminium cabin boat that ticks plenty of boxes with trailability, family friendliness and price, then your path down the rabbit-hole of searching has brought you to the right place.

The Anglapro Escapade is the smallest of this model of cabin boats from Anglapro. There’s also a 584 and a 624 on the books. All of the models in the range are made with 4mm bottom sheets and 3mm side sheets.

Robert Gaden Jr is just ‘waiting for a mate’ at the bottom end of Peel Island.

Like most cabins, there’s no super easy way to board the boat from the bow.

There is a front access hatch you can access through the cabin.

This underfloor storage/tank drains straight into the bilge.

When folded over, the rear seat gives access to the transom hatches, and in turn the batteries and isolators.

As expected, you can fill the rear seat with gear.

With a maximum horsepower of 135 listed, Yamaha’s F130 is a great match for this rig and delivers economy of up to nearly 3km/L at 3500rpm.

There’s an infill for the cabin that gives you access to 100% of the width. There’s no cabin door, so access is fairly easy.

The helm is pretty simple. If you juggle the engine gauges around there’s room for a larger flush mounted sounder.

Both helm seats have the fold-up base so you can convert them to be very suitable backrests for standing in position. There’s storage under both.

A transom door always makes it easier to get in and out of the boat, whether you’re on the water or on the trailer.

The bimini is a pretty important piece of kit in this rig – if offers plenty of shade and it’s high enough so that you can stand at the helm and look through the gap between it and the windscreen.

Rugged, aluminium factory fold-up steps are standard.

A relatively new addition to the Yamaha 4-stroke range, the F130 is pretty much an ideal fit for this hull.

The 554 Anglapro Escapade is the baby of the three-boat cabin range. Its bigger brothers are the 584 and 624.

And let’s get this in early – there’s a 5-year hull warranty if you package it with a factory-fitted Dunbier trailer. That’s a 5-year warranty on the hull and the trailer if you let the factory get it right for you. That’s pretty big news.

The test boat was supplied with a Yamaha 130hp 4-stroke outboard, which didn’t disappoint when it came to power. With a maximum horsepower rating of 135 on this hull, the Escapade didn’t suffer from lack of power. It’s actually a pretty fun ride!

Drop the throttle and this boat did 72km/h at 6,300rpm with an economy of 1.5km/L. With 110L underfloor, that gives a theoretical range of just over 150km, and you have the ability and ambition of driving everywhere like a lunatic. Drop down to the most economical cruising speed of 36km/h at 3,500rpm and that economy jumps to 2.8km/L and the range virtually doubles to nearly 300km. Plenty enough get you into some action of one kind or another.

As expected, this rig is a balance between comfort and fishability. If you’re after a massive cockpit to fish several people, you’ll be disappointed by the rear offset seat with lots of storage inside it – you can’t move it and it deletes some of the available space.

But if you’re looking for somewhere to stash all of the wet gear from when the kids went for their 10th swim of the day, you’ll love that you can localise this out of the cabin.

Everyone will love the transom door and bulletproof folding aluminium stairs that’ll make it easy to get in and out of the rig when it’s on the trailer or on the water. In both situations, egress from the back of the boat is easier than trying to do it from the bow – even though this boat is reasonably low. This rig draws little water, so spin the transom around and jump in that way. There’s non-skid on the step as well.

The cabin is wide and open. There’s no cabin door, so it’s not 100% private. Interestingly, the cabin remains the same size as the boats get bigger in this model – it’s just the cockpit space gets longer. So proportionally, there’s more cabin space in this boat than in the others in the range.

The helm features a couple of comfortable seats with storage underneath. You can fold back the padding on these seats to make it a lean-seat for when it’s rougher. This is an option that’s become popular in rigs like this because of the practicality. There’s room on the console to flush mount plenty of electronic accessories and although comfortable, there’s nowhere to rest your arm while wrangling the throttle.

We did like the bimini setup. It gives plenty of shade and there’s a lot of room between it and the windscreen. There’s nothing worse than when you have to pick ‘over or under’ when the top of the windscreen is right in your eye line. They’ve got this right, for my driving style anyway.

Naturally, there’s some wet storage under the floor that you can fill with fish or with wet gear.

Overall, it’s a comfortable family rig, a decent fishing boat and it’s at a price that you’ll love – not just because you won’t have to upgrade your standard suburban SUV to tow it. The test boat came in at just over $50,000, although base packages definitely come in at under the $50,000 mark.

For more information or your nearest dealer, visit www.anglapro.com.au or check out their socials by searching Anglapro on Facebook or Instagram.

Specifications:
Length 5.6m
Beam 2.29m
Max HP 135hp
Fuel 110L
Capacity 5 persons
Hull 4mm
Sides 3mm
Hull only 595kg

Performance:

RPM km/h km/L
1000 7 2.8
2000 11 2.5
3000 27 2.7
3500 36 2.8
4000 43 2.6
4500 49 2.4
5000 56 2.1
6000 69 1.7
6300 72 1.5