| The shortest hover ride in my history yet. | |||
| It was very windy/stormy day all in all, not a good day for hovercrafting at all. But ironically because of the weather i actually had to do some hovercrafting. | |||
| During the night we had got our first snow for this winter. As it was a father's day, we were driving to Ahlainen to greet my wife's father and grandfather and my father. On our way i noticed that water level in the river is quite high. | |||
| I knew that craft was tied so no worries about it floating away from hoverport, but just wanted move it little bit further away from flooding river. We picked my father-in-law and headed to hoverport. | |||
| The last small section of the road to get there wasn't flooding so it wasn't that bad as it seemed to be. We got to the river and there actually was plenty of water, but not enough to flood on the small parking lot. Me and him rowed over over the river and noticed that wind was really hard, you really had to use those oars to get somewhere. I'd suspect 20-25m/s. As if this wasn't enough sleet started to hit us horizontally. But we got to the other side. | |||
| Rubber boots were absolute necessity. Spot where Explorer usually rest is normally at least 30cm (1ft) above water, but it was 30cm (1ft) below water. Bow of the craft was floating, but aft was still sitting "tightly" on the ground. Without much thinking of it i removed rope holding the craft and started it. It started just fine, but since it was in the water now it started to crawl slowly and gust grabbed it and i was very busy at the helm for awhile. | |||
| First plan was just to drive it more uphill which i did, but it didn't help much since there were bushes in my way and couldn't get far enough to do any good. I stopped the craft and stepped out to check the spot of where i should try next. | |||
| We found a place and i started the craft and with the help from my father-in-law got the craft loose from the bushes. Gust grabbed the craft again pushing me towards a pole with tension wire inconveniently placed. Dropped the craft and waited for worst gust to go away. For next try i had to prepare "my moves" carefully. I first cautiously turned the craft head wind and then hit the throttle. I easily got to spot where craft usually rests and turned it back tail wind and carefully let "the breeze" take over until i was at the spot where i needed to turn it head wind again. I managed pretty well in getting it where i wanted just had to push the tail slightly and we were done. All this happened in the area of less than 10m x 15m (11yd x 17yd)! We tied the craft down with two ropes now and got ready to head back. Noticed some debris floating upstream so water was still rising. | |||
| I picked an alternator that i had in craft as a spare for other engine that is now fully assembled in my parents carage. By the time we were actually rowing back sun was shining and the river was almost dead calm. Really 100% change in just 30-30minutes. But when we drove back the section of the road i wrote earlier was now flooding which we suspected seeing all the debris floating upstream. | |||