Angry Fisherman Loses Outboard Motor, Dive Team Recovers It

Here's an update to a story I told on air a couple weeks ago. A fisherman got angry with the Backwater Gamblers during one of our practices and lost his motor in the Rock River.

This whole ordeal started at a Backwater Gamblers practice earlier this month. Some guy, who was apparently very upset, came up to our boat and started ranting and raving about making waves on the river and disturbing everyone else on the water.

The argument escalated to the point where the guy thought he'd give us a taste of what he has to deal with, "Let's see how you like it when people make waves!" Now he has his 15 horsepower motor wide open and cranked to the side so he's just spinning in circles.

After making a few rotations, the prop on his motor gets up out of the water and started skipping on the surface. Soon after that, the motor broke lose from his boat, launched into the air, and then sank to the bottom of the Rock. So we towed him back to land.

Fast forward to this past weekend, the folks over at Big River Rescue and Recovery went out and found the motor. Here's how they did it:

We started off by getting a possible area where the motor was last seen.... other than on the other guys boat. We did 8 passes at least and marked what we thought was a good target all be it a very small target located in a debris field of rocks and two sunken logs in about 8 ft of water. We then deployed the diver to work into the target and perform a sweep pattern about 40 ft wide in current about 3 mph.

The target was located a few feet from where we marked the target area which was about 40 ft from witness account. The motor was partially in-bedded in the mud. Stephen Ebel was on com guiding the pattern and giving two ft per sweep initially. after securing the target with rope and straps it was hoisted aboard once the diver was safely on the other side of the boat should both the primary and secondary line break.