[PescadorPete]

Here is a little history on a rather elegant and somewhat serendipitous engineering solution.

Before "fishing kayaks", off the shelf bling, slap down a credit card and go fishing, it was roll your own. So we would get a bilge pump, connect it to a cooler or vittles bin, hook up a 12 V battery and go fishing. After all, the pump was "rated" at 12 V. But the battery didn't last too long and the pump flow beat up the bait.

So some of us tried a resistor to knock down the flow and increase battery life and it worked but not too efficient.

Then some of us built PWMs that really controlled the flow and increased the battery life. On/off timer switches did more or less the same thing.

Then someone came up with the bright idea to try a 6 volt battery. Lo and behold, the bait tank flow was good, the battery life was greater than 2x the 12V and no electronics to mess up. A rather simple and elegant engineering solution which I would not characterize as lame.

Hobie didn't come up with this but I'm sure they saw what was posted here and on other boards on 6V batteries and decided to go that route. I run a 6V battery on my Hobie tank is it works just as well and just as long as my 12V PWM bait tank with less chance of failure.