| After a quite long lasting period of cold weather it's finally getting reasonable to think about hovering. We had about three weeks of about -10...-25C (14...-14F). | |||
| It's been about two months since last operation and i was kind skeptical if battery is still alive or not. | |||
| But my fear turned out to be unnecessary. After we dig the craft under the snow (that took about 20minutes alone) i turned on the main switch and ignition to let fuel pump fill the fuel lines while i was preparing myself for the ride. When i was ready i tried to crank and uit started immediately. | |||
| But next problem was that it had been two months and craft was located in this particular spot because of high water level and it had been weeks of freezing temp since. It was frozen down a bit ,but nothing too serious to get it loose. Funny thing we noticed: soil underneath the craft was not frozen at all. There were numerous shrew passages and i bet that family lost a good place to stay over winter. | |||
| I first took a short ride on the river toi check everything works as it should before going any further. It's again slippery i noticed. Compared to riding in summer ice hovering is totally different game. Craft slides on the ice so easily that's it would be hard to even imagine that without experincing it personally. Other than that craft seemed to work perfectly. I left a trace of debris behind me when frozen bits of grass started to drop from hull and skirt. | |||
| Maybe carb was freezing a bit or just have too high setting of idle speed, but it was very difficult to get engine running slow enough for hovering on a narrow river on ice. Tach showed 1600-1800rpm so have to take a look at that before next trip. | |||
| We headed to the bay. There was going to be lot's of ice, we knew that and we also knew that there would be strong ice to quite far away from the shoreline. We were not going to check how far it would be | |||
| Craft started just great, considering it was around 0C (32F). Since craft had rested in the water it had frozen down a bit, but not too much for single person to make it moving. As i got to the river everything seemed to work just fine. I had an idea to test if i could haul some floating debris away from here. | |||
| First i just pushed weed in front of the craft holding bow down with control ports open. Worked fine but as i hit more windy area waves broke my cargo. I tested another method: i slowly landed on a pile of floating vegetation and forced everything under the craft to follow my lead. With engine just above idle and Sevtec control ports open i managed to take quite a large amount of dead weeds to area where they wouldn't bother so much. After inventing the method it was quite easy to transport most of the debris away. | |||
| I spent more than hour circulating around and hauling grass away. I don't know if wind or current will bring it all back, but doesn't really matter since i can always do it again and again and again........ | |||