| Had been making hours during the week to sneak out earlier from work on Friday. Weather was not perfect, but good enough for hovering. At least the temperature was around reasonable figures being around freezing point. Some cold wind but nothing that couldn't be handled with proper clothes. | |||
| We headed N-NW direction in a side wind. There was several fishermen on the ice and we tried not to disturb them too much as we passed them along the way. There were four people onboard. | |||
| We explored different islands and few dead ends too while we tried to seek protected route to NW along the coast line. We drove about 10km up to small fishing village and turned SW away from islands and to sea. Plan was to use the tail wind and get back hoverport quickly assisted by tail wind. | |||
| Soon we were at open ice field ready to turn to SE and head back home. Explorer practically flew and we were really making progress after crawling round islands and number of rocks. | |||
| We saw packed ice in front of us and took new course closer to shoreline and continued forward. We could already see familiar islands in front of us as well as couple of sea eagles having a snack on ice. More packed ice was in our course, but i didn't want to go round as it would have meant loosing the advantage of tail wind. Looking back i should have changed the course, but that's too late now. | |||
| I slowed a bit, but if i slowed too much we'd start to loose cushion and had to throttle more. Then it happened, about 1m (3ft) high large chunk of solid ice appeared from nowhere and we hit directly it at 40-40km/h (25-28mph) speed. No one fell off the seat, i was standing and felt my left foot raise as well as enormous bang as we rammed over that chunk. We lost some speed and craft rocked some, but we kept going. We got to smooth ice in no time and got little behind of first islands to check-out the damage. | |||
| There was cracks in seams between plow plane and bottom panel. There was also some damage in front area of right side panel, only one that was clearly visible also inside the craft. | |||
| We got back to hoverport safely without any problems. While driving the craft from river to ashore alone something didn't felt right. Nose took off rapidly, but aft seemed to drag and would lift only if i throttled considerably more. We did ~20-25km (12-15miles) total. Due to operator mistake of judgment a new construction report is to be expected. | |||