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Mr. Luddite

On 8/14/2014 9:51 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 14 Aug 2014 20:10:00 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 8/14/2014 6:41 PM, Wayne.B wrote:

If you get something with big props and a fair amount of power, you
could dredge it a little at a time with prop wash.

There's a name for that, but I've forgotten what it is. Not an
"official" name ... more of a humor thing. "Panamanian dredging" or
something like that.

I did a bit after my first grounding on the ICW. A sand bar had
developed right in the middle of the channel beside an inlet from the
ocean following a storm. Fortunately I had heard it was there on the
radio and was going slow so no damage was done but the soft sand was
enough to keep stalling the engines when trying to pull back off the
sand bar in reverse. After a few tries I put the shifts in "forward"
and was able to slowly kick the RPM's up a bit without the boat moving
forward and held it there for a while. Then, I shifted to reverse. It
was enough to create a couple of mini channels behind the props and
rudders and allowed me to pull the boat off the sand bar into deeper water.

The preferred method here for blowing out small canals and such is to
tether a jet ski or two to something solid on the shore and start
blowing while they let out the lines. Retrieve and repeat.
That is certainly a Sunday trick, when DEP is home.
I also have a 3" mud pump for detail work and my neighbor has one on a
float.

When I was a kid we used to do that in the spring on a fresh water pond
to clear the bottom of leaves, twigs and branches near the shore where
we swam. We did it the other way around though.

I had a little 12 foot aluminum boat with a 5 horse Johnson.
We'd tie the transom to a raft that was moored out about 75 feet from
the shore line and I'd spend an hour or so making arcs back and forth,
stopping every once in a while to shorten up the line to the raft. I
couldn't move the raft and it's mooring blocks but the prop wash pushed
all the junk on the bottom out into deeper water, leaving a nice, sandy
bottom where people swam or walked in the shallow area.