Thread: Whew!

About 8 yrs ago my future wife and I was at the nuclear plant discharge and I idled over a tree stump and hung up. When I came off the tree stump, unnoticed by me, it pulled out my plug. It was looking stormy so I headed to delaware bay where I launched. About half way across the river my engine started cutting out. I stopped to check it and saw all the water coming in. I knew I had to get going to suck it out but guess what? The motor would not hit a lick. Delaware Bay looked at least a half mile away and the nuke plant maybe 3/10ths a mile so I manned the trolling motor and headed for the north bank. In a sshort while the trolling motor stopped. All this time it was lightning and the waves were 4 to 5 feet high and getting dark fast and just the nose of my Champion was sticking out. On top of all this, they had all the flood gates open and it was pulling us towards the dam. I told my now wife that if we dont abandon ship now and swim, we will float right to the dam. Remember, there is lots of barge traffic and we were right in the middle of the channel. With life jackets on, we started swimming in the dark. As I looked back, I could barey see the nose of my boat bobbing up & down gettin farther and farther away. I had excepted that my boat was a goner but that wasn't important to me right then. Several times my wife got exhausted and would give up. I would grab her life jacket and shove her ahead of me then catch up to her. I was 61 then and in better shape. Finally we reached the bank and it was a steep clay bank, had to grap old tree roots to pull ourselves up not knowing how many cottonmouths were entwined in the roots. To end the story, we walked through the woods and found a house and he took us to our truck. Called a friend and he got out of bed and brought his big ranger and we somehow found my boat fairly close to the dam and towed it in. To this day, my wife wont go on Dardanelle with me, just to Nimrod. I always advise people if they go from Russellville to Piney or Shoal Bay that it is better to load up and drive there, especially in unstable weather, I dont care what kind of boat you have, it can get pretty hairy.

WOW rtark sounds like you guys are lucky to be alive!! Thats why you wear PFD's. I survived a high speed boating accident on Greers and no one was wearing a PFD in either boat and we all survived. Still hard for me to go in and out of Hillcreek.

Man rtark, talk about bad luck.