Re: HELP, I'm sinking!
hummm...
Fastest was almost instant, Lake Mc Conaughy NE, Several Years ago, North east Beach, we saw the storm coming from the southwest and pulled our boats, we asked our neighbors if they wanted help pulling theirs, one was an older boat 60's or 70's and the other was a newer 20'+ pontoon, anyway they declined and didn't think they had anything to worry about, they had come to Big Mac for decades...
First concern is they are horrible liars, if they had actually been long time Big Mac boaters they would know very well how bad things can get.
Anyway both boats were tied to anchors front and rear with the stern out(you can see where this is going), Storm hits and the pontoon is first to pull anchor, waves were probably 5'-6' and pushed the pontoon 30' up the sand beach and dry docked it, the older boat wasn't as lucky, the first big wave swamped it and split the cap off the hull and it hit the bottom.
When I was a kid we had a flat bottom drag boat (friend of ours) jump our wake and dipped one side which caused it to barrel role, it went bow up instantly but those come up easy, they don't really sink so much as the bow looks like a bobber with the motor working against it, we hooked the bow eye up and started getting it out of the water, had it back on the water later that day.
My next one was maybe 5 minutes?
So I am cruising back to the ramp at Pueblo Res. with the Ole Lady at the time and we get waved down by a mid eighties 19' boat with an outboard that will not run and they are taking on water.
I hook my tow strap on it and load 3 of the 4 passengers on board my boat and begin to tow, after a few minutes the remaining passenger yells that the boat is taking on more water at an increasing rate and then discovers that the transom is separating from the hull at the keel, we decide to pull a little faster, this works but it certainly put more strain on the transom with the outboard hanging off it, One of the passengers calls a friend at camp who gets the trailer to the ramp, when we arrived at the ramp there was very little water in the boat and I kind whipped the boat into the ramp.
By the time they got it loaded it was pretty much swamped, it worked really well even though Boats don't whip in very easily! I talked to one of the Rangers about my coming into the ramp area a little "hot" but he told me he had no issues, the guy with the trailer had informed them of the situation.
The more I think about it, I didn't realize how many boats I've seen go under...
