Re: Rare project boat?
I think they were called water bikes or water cycles.
I remember some thing called a wet bike... It had a high seat and rode like a motorcycle
A friend had one of the first “Wet Bikes” when we were in High School and as apposed to today, it was the boats that were a danger to us. They would chase you all over the lake trying to see what it was, sometimes coming within feet of us at wide open throttle!
... and you think the PWC are nuts now days, boaters with a few drinks behind them can be really dangerous people ...
It was super cool and would run at about 50MPH at WOT. You rode it like a motorcycle & a horse at the same time. I remember having to wear knee pads because of the beating they would take while trying to hold on at speed in rough water.
It did have a weak point and that was the front HydroLink suspension. It would often break under the extreme conditions we put it through, and it was hard to get replacement parts for it. The last time it happened it took two years to find one, and he sold it without even taking it out again.
Spent many years of racing around Texoma on this thing though.
Saw a new one (never used) from a dealer on e-bay last month.
It was also used in a James Bond movie.
"The Wetbike ridden by James Bond in the move - The Spy Who Loved Me - "is the actual engineering prototype of the first Wetbike ever built. This Wetbike was ridden by Roger Moore when Bond travels across the water from a nuclear submarine to Stomberg's oceanographic laboratory Atlantis. The Wetbike was invented by Nelson Tyler (U.S. Patent #3,948,206) who made a name for himself in the film industry by inventing the most popular helicopter camera-mount system available."
www.foils.org/oneperson.htm
P.S. I guess I should add, that the most fun I ever had on the water, was on one of these!
