jay_merrill
Vice Admiral
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2007
- Messages
- 5,653
Today was a bit chilly for New Orleans, but very sunny and a seemingly nice day for some fishing. I got my boat ready for the outing last night and hooked the trailer to my van, so I could have an easy start this morning. All seemed to be in order for a day that should yield a redfish or two, and some speckled trout. The area that I chose, called the "Biloxi Marsh, is one that I have been in before, but not frequently.
As the day progressed, I mixed fishing with doing some exploring into areas that I had not previously been to. While doing this, I ran across a couple of guys in a bay boat with a very nice Yamaha 200 on the back. They were stuck in some shallow water and were trying to power out of it, blowing a rooster tail of water and mud about ten feet high and twently feet long. I waved at them and offered to come to them by using my kicker, so that I could pass a line for towing them out. They happily agreed, and after a few minor problems, I eventually pulled them into deeper water. As we were doing this, the boat's owner told me that he really didn't understand why the water was so shallow - he said he operated his boat in the area "all of the time" and never had a problem there.
The light bulb should have flashed in my mind, but it didn't.
After encountering some shallow areas myself, I decided to call it a day and headed back in. From the marshes, the path back to the marina includes a run up a canal that is about eight miles long. My boat isn't very fast to begin with, and I have a tendency to run it at partial throttle most of the time. On this trip home, I was only going about 22 mph, and that fact may well have saved my bacon - big time!
A few miles into the canal, I hit something under water. When I did, the motor cocked to one side and the boat was thrown violently into a tight right hand turn. I was very nearly thrown out of the boat, but managed to hang on while very quickly pulling the throttle back to idle/neutral. Even at that, the boat made a 270 degree turn before I was able to even begin to regain control.
When I turned around to look at the motor, what I saw didn't even register for a second or two. Eventually, I realized that my motor was hanging off of the back of the boat by the steering bracket & arm. Both of the eyes, through which the tilt bolt passes, had sheared! In nearly fifty years of boating, I have never seen this happen. The only saving grace to the whole thing, is that my motor is old enough not to have a tilt tube built into it. Instead I use an adapter that bolts to both of the upper transom bolts on the stern brackets. Since the steering arm attaches to the push/pull cable at the secured adapter, it kept the motor from falling into the water, or worse yet, ending up in the back of the boat.
So, after helping plenty of other people over the years, even including today, it was my turn to be towed in. I do have a kicker, and could have made it back on my own, but three very nice guys in another boat came by a few minutes after this happened, and offered to do the tow. I gladly accepted because we would get back sooner and I wasn't completely sure what the condition of my hull was. It just seemed to be a lot smarter to swallow my pride, accept the tow, and not risk being stuck out in the bayou at a time that was not all that far from nightfall.
I am, of course, pretty bummed out about this, because my '72 Johnson 65hp has been a great motor. Other than a few problems last year, it has been a very reliable. I know that I can replace the broken part (shop.evinrude.com says that it is still available), but my bigger concern is the gear box. A flashlight inspection when I arrived home this evening doesn't show any obvious problems, but I don't think I'll realy know until I strip the paint on portions of it to look for cracks, and drain the gear oil to check for water intrusion and/or metal.
Lessons learned on this "little adventure?" First, I am adamant about wearing a PFD while underway. I've heard all of the arguments for not doing so, but have never been swayed by them. Today was as good an example of how they can save your life, as any I've seen. Second, one of the things that someone did convince me was OK, turned out to nearly cause me to sink my boat. That thing, was to insert the drain plug from the outside of the boat. When the motor sheared off of its mounts today, the lower unit kicked forward into the transom and sheared the plug off. I didn't realize this at first, because I thought the water that was soon wetting my feet, was a result of the violent manuever. Fortunately, I keep several spares on the boat, realized what was going on, and inserted another from the inside. Another thing that helped was that I have a 1250 gph bilge pump in the boat, even though it is only 17.5 feet long. It will pump water out almost as fast as it can come in through the drain, so I was able to make it to the bank before the boat sank.
The biggest lesson, however, is to never become complacent. I'm beating myself up a little bit because I failed to recognise a couple of clues that I should have noticed. Even more importantly, I failed to act upon the ones that I did recognise. South Louisiana has always had problems with stumps and debris in its waterways, but since Katrina and this summer's hurricanes (Gustav & Ike), it has been worse than usual. That fact, combined with the unusually low water today, should have caused me to slow down even more than I did. I didn't and I paid the price.
The good news is that I have another motor just like this one in my shop. It needs a carburetor rebuild, but I could easily swap the ones on today's "victim" to that one. That said, this might be a good time to take a step back, inspect the boat thoroughly and get some maintenance items caught up on.
As the day progressed, I mixed fishing with doing some exploring into areas that I had not previously been to. While doing this, I ran across a couple of guys in a bay boat with a very nice Yamaha 200 on the back. They were stuck in some shallow water and were trying to power out of it, blowing a rooster tail of water and mud about ten feet high and twently feet long. I waved at them and offered to come to them by using my kicker, so that I could pass a line for towing them out. They happily agreed, and after a few minor problems, I eventually pulled them into deeper water. As we were doing this, the boat's owner told me that he really didn't understand why the water was so shallow - he said he operated his boat in the area "all of the time" and never had a problem there.
The light bulb should have flashed in my mind, but it didn't.
After encountering some shallow areas myself, I decided to call it a day and headed back in. From the marshes, the path back to the marina includes a run up a canal that is about eight miles long. My boat isn't very fast to begin with, and I have a tendency to run it at partial throttle most of the time. On this trip home, I was only going about 22 mph, and that fact may well have saved my bacon - big time!
A few miles into the canal, I hit something under water. When I did, the motor cocked to one side and the boat was thrown violently into a tight right hand turn. I was very nearly thrown out of the boat, but managed to hang on while very quickly pulling the throttle back to idle/neutral. Even at that, the boat made a 270 degree turn before I was able to even begin to regain control.
When I turned around to look at the motor, what I saw didn't even register for a second or two. Eventually, I realized that my motor was hanging off of the back of the boat by the steering bracket & arm. Both of the eyes, through which the tilt bolt passes, had sheared! In nearly fifty years of boating, I have never seen this happen. The only saving grace to the whole thing, is that my motor is old enough not to have a tilt tube built into it. Instead I use an adapter that bolts to both of the upper transom bolts on the stern brackets. Since the steering arm attaches to the push/pull cable at the secured adapter, it kept the motor from falling into the water, or worse yet, ending up in the back of the boat.
So, after helping plenty of other people over the years, even including today, it was my turn to be towed in. I do have a kicker, and could have made it back on my own, but three very nice guys in another boat came by a few minutes after this happened, and offered to do the tow. I gladly accepted because we would get back sooner and I wasn't completely sure what the condition of my hull was. It just seemed to be a lot smarter to swallow my pride, accept the tow, and not risk being stuck out in the bayou at a time that was not all that far from nightfall.
I am, of course, pretty bummed out about this, because my '72 Johnson 65hp has been a great motor. Other than a few problems last year, it has been a very reliable. I know that I can replace the broken part (shop.evinrude.com says that it is still available), but my bigger concern is the gear box. A flashlight inspection when I arrived home this evening doesn't show any obvious problems, but I don't think I'll realy know until I strip the paint on portions of it to look for cracks, and drain the gear oil to check for water intrusion and/or metal.
Lessons learned on this "little adventure?" First, I am adamant about wearing a PFD while underway. I've heard all of the arguments for not doing so, but have never been swayed by them. Today was as good an example of how they can save your life, as any I've seen. Second, one of the things that someone did convince me was OK, turned out to nearly cause me to sink my boat. That thing, was to insert the drain plug from the outside of the boat. When the motor sheared off of its mounts today, the lower unit kicked forward into the transom and sheared the plug off. I didn't realize this at first, because I thought the water that was soon wetting my feet, was a result of the violent manuever. Fortunately, I keep several spares on the boat, realized what was going on, and inserted another from the inside. Another thing that helped was that I have a 1250 gph bilge pump in the boat, even though it is only 17.5 feet long. It will pump water out almost as fast as it can come in through the drain, so I was able to make it to the bank before the boat sank.
The biggest lesson, however, is to never become complacent. I'm beating myself up a little bit because I failed to recognise a couple of clues that I should have noticed. Even more importantly, I failed to act upon the ones that I did recognise. South Louisiana has always had problems with stumps and debris in its waterways, but since Katrina and this summer's hurricanes (Gustav & Ike), it has been worse than usual. That fact, combined with the unusually low water today, should have caused me to slow down even more than I did. I didn't and I paid the price.
The good news is that I have another motor just like this one in my shop. It needs a carburetor rebuild, but I could easily swap the ones on today's "victim" to that one. That said, this might be a good time to take a step back, inspect the boat thoroughly and get some maintenance items caught up on.
