The test run was, well..."Eventful" or should I say, "water logged", lol. With all the time and expense I've put into this labor of love, I was admittedly too soft on the throttle which as you can plainly see in the video, caused it to porpoise and take in tons of water. I've had both Brad and Brian (two fantastic folks in the RC hydro community) look at the video and one thing they noticed is that my boat should probably be hand tossed like a nitro boat and hit that throttle to get her immediately up on plane. There was a large dock next to the run area I was really afraid of, so I was trying to navigate her away from it slowly. Also, it appears to be "nose heavy" and the suggestion is to move the batteries back which is music to my ears because I have plenty of space for that.
Knowing what I know now, I would have someone toss it in the water at the end of the dock, I would immediately hit the throttle and I would have all that open space in front of me to work with and it would be scooting fast enough to keep it dry internally for the most part.
I had two onboard cameras on it. One on the tail and one on the front. The front one was lost due to water damage. The one on the tail was fine. When I brought her out of the water, there was about 1/2" of water in the compartment, but worse, what sounded like about 2" or more of water sloshing fore and aft in the hull itself. How that much water breached the hull I am not sure.
Having no choice, and texting Brad, it was decided my only option was to drill a hole to let the water drain. GULP!!!!!
So, EXTREMELY regrettably, I ended up drilling two holes underneath the boat. The first hole wasn't draining that well. So I had to drill a second hole which really opened it up and the water successfully drained from the hull. So trying to make lemonade from lemons, I have decided to use the holes to my advantage. These boats should come with drain plugs for these very events. So I need to reach out to anyone that is smarter than me (shouldn't be too hard, lol) to see what they would suggest to use as drain plugs. I'm thinking something recessed so there's no drag in the water but can be unscrewed or removed somehow if/when water breaches the hull again for easy draining. I don't want to have to keep re-drilling. So if anyone has ideas please let me know!
There's only one very brief moment where I got her on plane and "hit the gas" so-to-speak...And she really MOVED and made that great hydro sound...It's between the 1:12 and 1:17 mark of the Part 2 raw video below. It was very brief but sweet and gave me the passion to get her back out there and do her right next time. Brad is going to meet up with me on Saturday, June 29th so I fully expect a much more successful outing.
As Brad put it last night:
"Your day was a success. The boat is not at the bottom of a lake and you didn't bring it home in a sack."
Raw video of the test run Part 1
Raw video of the test run Part 2
Onboard Vid (Very short as I didn't have a whole lot of good footage, lol)...