Devils Lake Accident

[Brett58852]

My onboard charger bit the dust. It showed the batteries were fully charged when I left town but they only had enough juice to stow and deploy the TM after I cut the boat loose. Apparently not enough to turn the prop on because the TM battery light start flashing and beeping on the remote. Took the boat home and found 2 of the 3 batteries were shot, along with those glorious Ranger 4 bank chargers that everyone tosses in the trash.
i had a different one shake out the magnet that passes the sensor telling it when it was stowed and deployed. Luckily that was after we were already in the boat. The first thing I did on my new one was super glue and scotch tape the magnet in place.

 

[NDSportsman]

As much as I love my Ulterra, it started a chain of poor decisions on my part a few weeks ago that could have ended in a similar situation.
When the boat doesn’t come back to the dock to pick you up and you see the wind blowing it out to the main part of Sakakawea, it’s a plain bad choice to strip and swim after it. A guy doesn’t realize how fast the boat it moving versus how fast an out of shape guy can swim.
Long story short....I caught up to the boat shortly after my lungs felt like they were bleeding, but I was too exhausted to pull myself up in the boat and I don’t have a ladder on my Ranger. 2nd poor choice: I swam the boat back to shore so I could get some leverage to climb in. Not only did my lungs hurt at this point, my heart was pounding out of my chest.
Now that I think back, it would have been nerve racking but a much more solid play to cut my losses and call a buddy with a boat to go help me retrieve it....regardless of whether it was still floating or washed up on the rocks somewhere.

A little trick to get back in your boat is to use your big motor. If it's tilted up all the way it might not work too well unless you have a switch on the motor to lower it but a foot on the lower unit should launch you enough to get back in. My dog sits on the trolling plate when he falls out, gotta remember to kill the engine right away lol