Saturday, July 1, 2000

Well, we know that the craft doesn't run as well as it will someday, but that isn't going to stop us from using her in the meantime.  We live across the street from a bayou and one of our neighbors has been kind enough to allow us to use the boatramp in their backyard.  So, we loaded up and decided to head off into the wild blue.....well, lets just say we just decided to head off for the day!  It made for an interesting start as we tried to manuever from our parking spot out through and between all those cars in the drive!  Mark, a UH17P builder (still in process), came over to shoot some pictures (of course I can't drive and take remote pics at the same time, I'm not that good yet!)  And then there were the cars that insisted on driving down our street!  (Look carefully at the lower right corner of the first pic.  He didn't even slow down.)  What nerve!  You would have thought they would be interested enough to stop, see what's going on and let me have complete access to anywhere I wanted to go!  I tell you what, streets are not level!  Since we started from a dead stop, we had to go almost straight over the road.  If I tried to turn to quickly we just slid right back over onto the curb.  I guess we really only stopped and made one car wait for a minute and I'm sure they didn't know quite what to think.  So much for pavement, I was glad to leave it behind.  Now where did he say his backyard was?  Oh yeah!  To the left, down the side yard, around that big white building, watchout for the dip in the yard, between a couple of bushes....wait!  There's the ramp!  Over there!  Alright now, lets ease up and make sure we're going to go straight down that ramp.  There's a piling or two that's a little close, this must have been built for a little Johnboat or something.  Okay now, easy on the throttle and away we go!  Wow, sliding down this ramp is cool.  To bad that other piling is there, we could been over the hump already!  Well, I guess we'll just go easy till we get down the canal a bit.  The turns are a little tight down through here anyway.

Well, this canal is about a quarter mile long and weaves through a small residential area before it gets to the open bayou.  Its a nice little ride and you get to sneak peaks into everyone's backyard, not that they should mind or anything, they're the ones that wanted to live on the water!  :-)  Naturally, we turned the heads of everyone that was sitting outside and even saw a few people come out of hiding as we went by.  I hope it was because we were unique and not because we were to loud.  I will get the noise thing fixed when the new engine goes in.  Well I knew this was coming!The tide is up a bit high today, I wonder if we really have enough clearance to get under this bridge?  Hey, if we both stand on the rear deck (GULP!  Will she stay afloat?) maybe we can slip under?  Man, this looks tight, but lets try it!  Excellent, we scraped for a couple inches but the crown in the bottom of the bridge gave us just enough clearance to push our way through.  Now I rememeber why I decided not to mount those lights on top of the guard.  Now that's what I call a tight fit!  Well, there's the bayou, lets go see if we can beat Mark to the next picture taking spot way over there!  --->

Looks like Mark is really excited about all this.  He beat us and had time to drink a beer too! At least that's what it looked like (I think it was really his camera gear that he kept looking through, but I'm gonna tell everyone it was a beer!  Shhhh...don't let his wife about it!)  Well, there is this nice little spot I keep eyeballing everytime I drive around the bayou that I think would be a great spot to use to come up onto dry land.  It ends up being a little narrower than I expected.  A 14 foot craft definitely has more length on land that it does on the water! You can see the power pole wires right there where I wanted to go and of course all this is doing is increasing my experience with turning on sloping land! This must be why we mostly run on the water, its almost always level!  Well we got by the wires, got past the Mangroves and turned ourselves around and realized another reason why we like the water, you don't get sand blown in you face!  Well, we parked for a few, watched traffic slow down went by us  :-)  and gave our thanks to Mark for taking these great pictures.  I know I'll return the favor for him when he gets his UH-17P complete.  We both can't wait until we can go cruising the area together.

So on our way we went.  We followed the bayou out to the Anclote river and started upriver through town.  Tarpon Springs is a neat little Greek village and we got to see all the tourists walking the docks and riding the tour boats.  Everyone watched and waved as usual while we went by, it is really neat to see the kids point and get excited as we go by.  We followed the river for a mile or two and we decided to pull over to the shore, get out the cooler and watch a few boats go by.  I found a nice spot on "dry" land and pulled up and turned the craft around.  As I was turnign her I noticed the rudders were acting funny.  Then it seemed as though they didn't work at all!  Well, they didn't.  I found the problem, it was the coupling I made for the joint between the front and rear steering torque rod!  It just split wide open!

Well, as luck would have it, I didn't bring my tool box cause everything has been working great mechanically.  So I pulled out the cell phone and while I tried to make a call it shut off!  Dead batteries, I guess I'll have to be sure to charge it on my way home from work on Fridays.  Now what?  Look!  Out there!  Its a boat coming our way!  Quickly, I started waving frantically and sure enough, they started to come over.  We chatted for a few minutes and we looked over my situation.  "I have some small hose clamps and a screwdriver on my boat.  Wanna try it?" he says.  I had my doubts but I told him sure I would.  I worked great, three clamps later the rudders were back.  What happened was that I used EMT conduit and cut a slit in it so it would slide over the torque tubes.  The tubing is actually formed round from flat material and I unluckily drilled the screw holes right through the seam.  This of course weakened it so much it split right through the screw holes!  I'm surprised it lasted this long.

Well, we figured it was best to head back now and not try to get on bubble.  It was a nice easy ride back the way we came and at least a pleasant day on the water.  The folks in the boat that assisted us started following us us back.  I told them we would be fine but they were actually thrilled to see a hovercraft in operation, even if it wasn't perfoming the way it should.  They came with us all the way back to the bridge.  We said our thank yous and goodbyes and told we were sure we'd meet out here again someday, and I'm sure we will.  The most interesting thing was, if you go back and look at the picture where we are negotiating our way past the power poles, you'll see them out in the bayou watching us.  They were with us the whole day and we didn't even know it.  I guess they were our gaudians for the day and we want to expres our thanks again for helping us out.

This is what hovercrafting and boating is all about and we hope everyone that has read my posts is
as lucky as we are, and as helpful to others, as the people we've met so far.

Happy Hovering
and may all your voyages be like
riding on a cushion of air!