About 30 seconds in the crowd gets a thrill.
About 3 minutes in and they show it in slow motion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkFk_eTJo5o
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About 30 seconds in the crowd gets a thrill.
About 3 minutes in and they show it in slow motion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkFk_eTJo5o
Fantastic, thanks for posting!!
0:36 the water is very brown in the area of the crowd.
The Aussies make us look wimpy
That really could have been bad... That was some great driving, or just plain panic with a little luck.
that was ****ing close!!!!...like 282 said it was either great driving , luck or a combination of the two... any way you slice it there were some lucky people in that crowd
:eek:
Pure luck. The hull bow-hooked. This can happen to any performance vee hull, especially outboards. The bow drops, and the forward half of the keel takes over and drives the hull into a violent uncontrolled turn. In this case, it was caused by a slight porpoising while making a high-speed turn.
There's no "controlling" a hooking hull. You just have to ride it out. Happened to me once. Very scary.
According to the comments of the spotter listed at the bottom of the video, it was a conscious decision of the driver to continue the hook to the left as opposed to try and recover and risk hitting the crowd. The resulting forces threw the spotter into the driver and broke his arm. But if that was the worst injury, they were lucky.
I don't think I would want to do much water skiing at those speeds in a narrow river.
You can actually control a hook if you catch it in time by turning the steering wheel and tapping the throttle. Been there done that many times at higher speeds than I care to admit.
Testing and getting on and over the edge certainly keeps your senses and reactions at their peak.
The people on shore were very lucky no doubt.
It looked to me like there could have been some type of mechanical failure since they just drifted to the side and didn't try to get the skiers out of harms way asap.
I'm going to rephrase a bit.
You can control a hook before it becomes a hook once you know the feel right before it happens. Kinda like controlling chine walk is the best way to describe it.
The Lord was watching over those folks that day. Could've been real messy.
I think Pyro is right about what caused it, but I think the driver steered into it and hit the throttle to make it turn as sharp as it did.
You can hear the throttle come up in the turn. Probably would have not worked if it had not been a jet.
Bad luck+driver skill+good luck=lucky day for everybody.
Notice those fools were back in the water when the 2nd boat came through. Nutz.:nonod:
Lucky part was that the driver knew what to do with a hooking jet boat and he had enought room to do it. If in fact this was a conscious move on his part, a high five to him. The Navy SWCCC boat drivers are taught this type of response. I drive many of their boats and the WORST thing to do is to back off the power. As said above, this could have been much worse.