SinkCraft 20CC sinks!

[ocuyler]

Well, almost, anyway. Tom and I decided to take a last blast on Lake Ontario Tuesday, so we launched at local town ramp I have never used. There we 2's and 3' breaking on the inlet, but no problem - it's a SeaCraft. We launched and while Tom was parking the truck, I ran the little inlet slowly, carefully picking my line in the un-marked channel. The 20 took the little breakers nicely so I turned around between swells and picked up Tom at the dock. Out we went again on the same line, except this time, we took a big breaker in the shallowest part of the channel and the motor dropped so low she clunked a basketball size rock and the motor stalled.

The motor did not restart after clunking hard again on the next swell. In less than a minute, the 20 MPH winds had the boat bow first against the low rock breakwall. Our attempts to raise the motor failed and now she was grinding skeg on rocks and tipping the boat. In the waist deep water we go (55 degrees). We decided to wedge the boat between some flat rocks to prevent dammage from the hull pounding. The motor dug it's way in about 6" down into baseball sized rocks. So now that we're that were stabilized, we tried to get the motor up. Standing at the transom the "little" 3' breakers were hitting us about neck high and starting to fill the boat. Within 5 minutes, the water worked it's way into the bilge (the scuppers worked OK) and overwhelmed the brand new Rule 500 GPM automatic pump and quickly the electrical system shorted. So she settled in nicely with about 2000 pounds of water weighing it down. It got dark and we were mildly hypothermic (not really, but it seemed like it, so we left the boat for the night.

The wind shifted overnight to our favor and we got back to the boat at 6:15 AM. The waves had layed down to 1' and we were able to de-water the boat with my little 4 HP Honda water pump (highly reccomended) and got it floating again. With 2 x 4's, Tom lifted the stern with each wave and we were able to work it out into deeper water and walk it back to the launch along the shore. Recovered!

Assessing the damage, we found that the prop was trashed, but the skeg intact. We found less than 10 gel coat chips the size of a quarter or smaller.

Morals of the story: 1> Don't hit rocks. 2> Wear your PFD.
3> If you wanted to paint the hull of your boat, but couldn't justify it - just slam it on some rocks for a few hours and now you have a reason. 4> That splashwell enclosure is starting to look pretty good...