| Day started out to be really foggy
and quite chilly, had to scrape windshield of my car before heading to
hoverport.
As we got closer to our hoverport fog started to clear and by the time we were ready to take off sun was shining. Of course this meant that wind was also raising. We had all together three persons onboard and i decided to operate quite close to shore line just incase we'd experience engine trouble. After all, engine cover was folded inside of small bow cabin. We gained up speed of about 40km/h to front-side wind and cruised few kilometers along coast to find a access to a small vegetated channel . After some searching we did find that allthough we visited couple of dead-ends before finding what we were looking for. It's sure nice to drop the craft off cushion, open bow ports, turn rudders full and then apply some throttle. Even a large craft like Explorer turns in quite a small space and only thing to watch is that propeller doesn't hit branches hanging above water. We stopped to show the craft at some relatives and off we went. Only after we got back to this narrow river we were looking for, i noticed the familiar phenomenon - engine rpm was dropping. Luckily we were still in river section so i steered aside and stopped the engine. It would have been no use to hit the more open area if engine wasn't running well. There were water drips all over spark plug leads and i dried them crafully. After that engine run well, but we were stuck in vegetation. As we had no inertia to wipe over vegetation we weren't able to launch. We tried shifting weight, pushing and pulling but we were stuck. Of course while throttling a lot to get out of there engine room was again all wet. I dried it and planned the second try more carefully. Now we were able to wipe out those weeds and headed back to sea. We had a tail-side wind and i throttled some more to gain the record speed for this craft and i topped 47.8km/h (29.7mph). There wasn't any boaters nor fishermen out there even though weather was quite nice. We explored few other shallow waters and made a around trip in local delta system where row boat has been the form of transportation for us so far. Someone had also closed this route with lamprey traps to my surpise. They really don't give much of change to those poor "suckers" as they block every river with hoop nets. Windshield really protected us who were in front seat, but our guest at the center of craft was at certain time soaked. Luckily all of us were prepared for some spray so there was no harm done. |
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| Here you have few pics of the new windshield | |||
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