Prop Help

[chris_from_cincy]

I tried sifting through the multitude of prop selecting forum posts first but haven't really found one that covers what I'm looking for. Last weekend a friend was picking me up from the courtesy dock after I parked the truck and trailer... right as he was idling away from dock (which was pretty close to the very rocky shoreline anyway) a couple of big cruisers went by at full throttle putting out some monster wakes that pushed us towards the shore... long story short we had a little run in with a submerged boulder. luckily the breakaway hub did its job but the hub and prop are toast. fortunately we had the original prop that came on the boat. The previous owner swapped the OEM quicksilver three blade 14.5" 19p for a Michigan Wheel vortex 4 blade 15" 16p (which is the one that got destroyed)... Here's our setup: The Boat is a 2006 Maxum 2000 SR3 20' open bow runabout has the mercruiser carbed 5.0 with an Alpha-1 gen-2 stern drive (i'm not sure of the gear ratio, anyone know where to find that out?). When running at WOT we were somewhere around 35-38 MPH @ 4400RPM. We used our GPS speedometer app for the MPH but the RPMs are a guesstimate because I never needed to know the exact RPMs at WOT before this weekend. we haven't gotten a chance to run the run boat with the swapped original 3 blade yet. After checking the forums it seems like the 4-blade is probably what we're going to go with again. We use our boat for towing our kid on the tube and both of us on the wakeboards. We enjoy cruising the lake, going from cove to cove, tubing and wakeboarding just about everytime we go out. We aren't looking to win any races, I wouldn't mind a little more speed on the top end but if i had to choose between holeshot and quick planing to get my big butt out of the water when wakeboarding or a few MPH on the top end I'd probably go more for holeshot and getting on plane quicker. That being said here's my question should I stick with just replacing the 4 blade with the exact 15" 16p prop we were running or what results could i expect if i went with the 14.5" 18p or even the 14" 20p?? I've seen a few folks with 5-blade props what are the benefits of those? Size and pitch for my described setup?