Ive seen quite a few fishing boats of all kinds, I think I’ve seen one or two with the trolling motors mounted on the rear, and those boats were outboard engine powered and the trolling motor was mounted to the transom. IMHO if you don’t have the patience or the skills to mount one up front then have it mounted by a professional up front.
When spot locked you want your bow into the wind or current. When trolling you want the trolling motor pulling the front of the boat, our boats have very little keel and any breeze that comes along is going to want to make the boat weather vane or crab, if the troller is in the rear a breeze is going to push the bow sideways and the troller will want to tow the boat backwards through the water after that, even without a breeze it’s going to be quite difficult to keep the boat going straight forward.
@HangOutdoors is correct, you should not have a trolling motor in the water at speed, get a quality MFD, Garmin, Humminbird, Lowarance etc.. with its own transducer mounted on the stern, you’ll use the chartplotter a lot, and having the down imaging will be very useful to see what’s under the boat when you’re not fishing. Speaking of chart plotters, the MFD you choose should have high definition under water maps of the lakes you are on, I don’t know about the others, but the Humminbird MFD’s have slots for Micro SD cards maps for different regions. I would imagine the other MFD manufacturers have something similar. Another great feature is being able to put a color overlay on a chart for prime fishing depths, and being able to show shallow water-on mine this overlay is red and I set it for five feet, this is a great feature when cruising to avoid shallow spots. The 2D sounder and side scan are great tools when fishing.
