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Well I've got some sad news to report. Today I was out running the family dinghy as a retrieval/rescue/driver platform boat for my friend's Impulse 31. On the first run of the day (30 seconds after his normal mid-run heat check) and 3rd on the boat, it took a little hop, bounced once, and stuffed (popping both hatches off despite tape and the latch) at about 15 mph accelerating out of a turn.
In the 10 seconds (yes it was only 10 seconds as the motor of the rescue boat was running and it happened less than 30 feet away) it took to get to the crash scene, the hull filled up with water and sank FAST by the stern, never even bobbing up. All he's got left is the outer hatch, transmitter and his spare prop/batteries. I lost my pair of Dynamite 4500 NIMH packs in the crash.
20 minutes of a visual search turned up negative, as did an hour and a half of using fishing gear, treble hooks, and a 200 pound retriever magnet. The next step will be trying to find a diver, but it's a decent sized area where we were running, and the water is murky, so recovery probability is low at best. Needless to say he's ticked (and so am I having lost batteries too).
The guy he spoke to at Horizon was sympathetic, but it seems that they won't do anything for him. Call me crazy, but with a decent amount of foam in the bow (plus two extra blocks that filled up the areas next to the battery tray that I made for him) the boat should float even with a decent amount of water in it. I'm starting to wonder if the boat has enough flotation to stay up at all if the hatches are breached following seeing this one go down.
Maybe there was a bad pour of foam in the front of that particular boat, or it isn't designed with enough reserve buoyancy for the extra weight of the NiMH packs. It did not seem as though the hull was damaged in any way from the wreck as there was NO trace of it on the surface afterwords (having seen plenty of full scale unlimited hydro and offshore wrecks, there's ALWAYS some parts on the surface when a hull is destroyed). As a naval architect in training this is something I'll be looking into, but it's too late for this particular boat. $300 worth of boat and $80 worth of batteries gone in a flash...
Not sure if Darin or anyone else could stop in and shed some light on that situation (as far as the foam being enough to hold the bow up for more than a second or two before this beautiful boat doing its best Titanic impression). I wish the guys in product support could back and support this product with the same passion that he puts into designing/racing and helping us with setups. After seeing how fast she sank and that HH can't do anything about it, I doubt I'll ever be spending money with them again.
I guess I just needed to vent, but if you guys have any thoughts on what could have happened I'd like to hear it. Obviously with the experience most of you guys have, you've probably wrecked more boats than the two of us have owned combined, so maybe I was naive to expect a whole hull of foam (not branded Boston Whaler) to float after a pretty benign accident.
In the 10 seconds (yes it was only 10 seconds as the motor of the rescue boat was running and it happened less than 30 feet away) it took to get to the crash scene, the hull filled up with water and sank FAST by the stern, never even bobbing up. All he's got left is the outer hatch, transmitter and his spare prop/batteries. I lost my pair of Dynamite 4500 NIMH packs in the crash.
20 minutes of a visual search turned up negative, as did an hour and a half of using fishing gear, treble hooks, and a 200 pound retriever magnet. The next step will be trying to find a diver, but it's a decent sized area where we were running, and the water is murky, so recovery probability is low at best. Needless to say he's ticked (and so am I having lost batteries too).
The guy he spoke to at Horizon was sympathetic, but it seems that they won't do anything for him. Call me crazy, but with a decent amount of foam in the bow (plus two extra blocks that filled up the areas next to the battery tray that I made for him) the boat should float even with a decent amount of water in it. I'm starting to wonder if the boat has enough flotation to stay up at all if the hatches are breached following seeing this one go down.
Maybe there was a bad pour of foam in the front of that particular boat, or it isn't designed with enough reserve buoyancy for the extra weight of the NiMH packs. It did not seem as though the hull was damaged in any way from the wreck as there was NO trace of it on the surface afterwords (having seen plenty of full scale unlimited hydro and offshore wrecks, there's ALWAYS some parts on the surface when a hull is destroyed). As a naval architect in training this is something I'll be looking into, but it's too late for this particular boat. $300 worth of boat and $80 worth of batteries gone in a flash...
Not sure if Darin or anyone else could stop in and shed some light on that situation (as far as the foam being enough to hold the bow up for more than a second or two before this beautiful boat doing its best Titanic impression). I wish the guys in product support could back and support this product with the same passion that he puts into designing/racing and helping us with setups. After seeing how fast she sank and that HH can't do anything about it, I doubt I'll ever be spending money with them again.
I guess I just needed to vent, but if you guys have any thoughts on what could have happened I'd like to hear it. Obviously with the experience most of you guys have, you've probably wrecked more boats than the two of us have owned combined, so maybe I was naive to expect a whole hull of foam (not branded Boston Whaler) to float after a pretty benign accident.
Nortavlag Bulc
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