7/17/2012
Five of the Tri-State crew recovered this boat that was 45' deep in Pelican Lake. A mechanic was working on an 18' I/O Bayliner boat on a lift. He did some work on the motor, vented out the compartment, started it up, ran it for awhile, and then when he shut it off it blew up burning it to the water line. He took it off the lift to tow it to the access behind his 16 foot fishing boat. As he was pulling it across the lake a big boat came too close and its wake rolled over the boat and sent it to the bottom. He was able to cut the tow rope before it took his boat to the bottom. The call came in on Monday afternoon from the owner. Rick and I meet with the mechanic and he took us out to the spot where it went down. After about 2 hours with the side scan sonar we had few promising hits so we did the grid going the other way and had a very strong hit. We then switched over to the depth finder and it showed up sitting in 45' of water with the stern sitting on the bottom and the bow pointing up. Tuesday morning Ryan, Rick, Tom, Tyler and Seal recovered the boat. When we got it raised and starting towing it back to shore it came up on plane and made it easy to tow back to shore. With a shallow bay at the access, a long line was attached to the wreck and a pickup pulled it to shore for loading on a trailer. Pelican lake is infested with Zebra muscles, an invasive species, so all the dive gear, equipment and boat needed to be cleaned to prevent their spread to other bodies of water. Here are some pictures and a video by Rick of the salvage operation.
Click
to see the video of the salvage operation.
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