Cheap floating, Back in business, MI, 150 Minutes, Rowing
On Saturday morning I did my first significant auto maintenance since moving to the house, rotating the tires on my Tesla, something I try to do every 10,000 miles or so. I got rid of a TON of stuff when I moved but luckily I still have my low profile floor jack and impact wrench, both of which are crucial for the job. It went well besides sweating like a pig. I was done in less than 30 minutes. I’m happy to see that the tires are holding up well 31k miles in.
Late morning I rode my OneWheel to the gym to work out. It was a combo of things I never did before and it was kind of cool. It’s nice to be close enough to have options like that.
Saturday night we saw the new Mission Impossible movie which is dubbed as part 1 of a 2 film series. This was the first MI movie in quite awhile and the first time I saw one where I thought that maybe Tom Cruise is getting a little too old for the role. Sure he is in great shape for his age but still, it’s noticeable. The plot was sort of dumb. I would probably say it was my least favorite MI movie of the series which makes less than thrilled that they have another one lined up. I would feel it’s safe to say that this will be the last of the it’s kind although after seeing Harrison Ford do another Indiana Jones movie at 80, never say never I guess.
Sunday morning I met my buddy Juan to once again play pickleball at that expensive community. Evidently the club members we play with enjoy our company. We played for two and a half very hot, humid and sweaty hours. My final game was a singles match against the 21 year old club tennis pro who also plays pickleball. The kid at one point was ranked top 10 in the country in his age group in tennis. My initial goal was to hope to score a point on him. I managed to get 6 points which in my book was a win considering how tired I already was.
Early Sunday afternoon we loaded up all of the boat stuff to do a test run. We wanted to see how easy/difficult it would be to set everything up and how the inflatable would do in the water. We learned a lot.
Inflating the boat was pretty easy, the included battery powered inflator pushed massive volumes of air. There are three separate chambers that need to be inflated which avoids having a single point of failure.
Mounting the motor happens after the boat is inflated. At first I attached the motor mount and then tried to attach the motor before doing so and couldn’t do it, more on this later as it was one of the many learning opportunities I had. So once the motor was on all I had to do was lift the very heavy battery on board and connect the wires. We were off and moving.
I initially planned to sit on a fold up chair but I found myself more comfortable just laying in the rear of the boat using the sides as armrests as I steered with one arm and drank a margarita with the other. I had on my sun repelling fishing shirt on as well as my Eagles bucket hat to cut down on my UV exposure. The 46 pounds of thrust motor was nothing resembling powerful but pushed along at a what would be a fast walking speed which was good enough.
Christine and I were enjoying the slow tour of the area where she does shelling on a pretty regular basis. We then switched spots and I let her run the motor as the goal was to get her familiar and comfortable with the set up. She was warm and hopped into the water a bit. When she got back in the boat she got back in the driver position but we were having a hard time going anywhere. Well to be more accurate we weren’t going anywhere, the motor had stopped working, oh shit…
I hopped out of the boat to take a better look. The water was quite shallow, shallow enough that the prop was probably hitting the sandy bottom. My initial thought was the motor overheated, I started looking for some sort of reset button on it which I could not find. The LED battery indicator on the motor was dark. I started to wonder if perhaps the battery had just run out of juice which seemed unlikely as it is a huge battery and was reading full charge at the beginning of the ride. So I needed a plan to get back.
Luckily we threw the oars in the boat. I pushed it until we got to the main crossing channel under a bridge which is much deeper. After testing the motor again, hoping it cooled down/reset I resigned myself to having to row. Rowing this thing was very awkward and tiring but I managed to eventually get us across the channel and back to an opening on the beach where we could dock. I was tired.
We had another lesson when removing the motor mount. Trying to remove all the fasteners at once carries a high risk of dropping some of the hardware into the water which happened. Luckily I was able to get the same size at the local hardware store. When we got everything loaded back into the truck we were both pretty wiped, it was hot.
As soon as we got back to the house I wasted little time before I threw the battery on the table to test it’s voltage, it was still basically full so the battery was definitely not the problem. I then reconnected the motor but it still showed dead. I again looked for a reset button on the motor but found none. However I then looked at the little device that was inline on the positive motor battery cable. On the side of it was a little black button. I pushed it in and the motor lit right up, son of a bitch. It’s basically an inline circuit breaker to protect the motor.
My assumption is the motor was trying to turn in the sand which drew enough power to pop that circuit breaker. Knowing that all of that rowing could have been easily avoided was frustrating but a good learning experience. We learned a number of other things from the journey like we could have inflated the boat a little more than we did and that we actually had the motor mounted backwards. This revelation made my earlier discovery that the motor had to be on the mount before attaching it to the boat invalid. Reversing the mount should put the prop in a better position to drive the boat and make the quick release latch that is used to get the prop in a higher position functional. Even with all of the bumps in the road it was a fun time. I can not give you any where near an accurate estimation of the last time I was out on the water like that. I do however expect to happen on a more regular basis in the future.