Sooo...... I don't know if anybody read my post about going out on Saturday and having a little mishap, well here's the illustrated story.
A friend was trying to get up on the wakeboard, well she is not very good and couldn't stay up. Needless to say her last fall the rope whip lashed her in the knee. I turned around and went to pick her up. When I got there, the angle I took put me kind of close to the shore so I told, once you are on the back of the boat, I'm gonna idle away from the shore a little bit. Well, I was back up and I heard someone say uh stop, then an immediate thud thud thud. I thought somehow the wakeboard went under the boat so I threw it in drive to try get away from it, hearing more thud thud thud I stopped and killed the engine. When I turned around they said I had run over the rope...and handle come to find out.
Well the water is 48 degrees right now. Luckily this time if year I wakeboard in my 7.5mm diving wetsuit with a hood for lack of anything else. I donned my wetsuit and wet diving with a rope around my waist in case I there was an issue, they could pull me out. It was that cold you cant hold your breath for very long so it probably took me 15 trips under the boat to finally get the thing untangle. By then I literally couldn't feel my feet and my hands were getting pretty stiff.
Soooo, we checked the boat when we pulled out and there was a little rubber from the handle wedged in the prop shaft and the strut. Today I noticed the real damage. Apparently those handles are made of aluminum or something and it really dinged the bottom of my boat up. It looks like what happened is the prop hit the middle of the handle, as you can tell by the gouge, then spun it around hitting the bottom of the boat, hence the thud thud thud I heard. Here are some pictures....
The Handle Set Up
The Rope
The gouge in the Handle
The part that I think F-ed my boat up