Oman Fishing 2022
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should've just sailed there instead of flying
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It was all going so well.
My luggage turned up in the middle of the night.
We had to leave the lodge at 05:15 to get the boat launched before the tide got too low. So I got up at 04:00 and sorted my tackle etc out. All good. We had a quick breakfast and launched the boat.
We got up on the plane, cruising at about 30knots and heading for the islands. It's a 40 or 50 minute passage, so I got my head down to catch some sleep. I was sitting just forward of the starboard engine and half asleep, when all hell broke loose. There was the most tremendous crash, I got pummelled from behind by something very hard and heavy, and the boat came to a grinding halt.
A breaching humpback whale had hit us and stopped the starboard engine dead in its tracks. The trim cylinder and rod were fucked and the whole engine pivoted forward hitting the seat back and pushing that forward into me.
A reel foot sheared when it hit my shoulder, such was the force of the impact. Luckily all that has happened to me is that I have some bad bruising to my left hand shoulder and my range of motion in my left arm is a little restricted.
That is the seat back, it was straight this morning, I was sitting between the 2 rod holders….
Some of the damage to the boat where the seat-back is attached to the hull
Tilt mechanism hydraulic cylinder
Bust reel
Continuing was out of the question, so he turned around and headed back to shore on the port engine. Trouble is, now the tide had gone out further and we could not lift the starboard engine out of the water. This made it extremely difficult to get the boat onto the trailer and out of the water. We would normally accelerate onto the trailer, but we only had one engine and the other was sticking into the sand. We eventually managed to get the boat on the trailer and then get the now stuck truck and car out of the water…
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Wow, that could have ended much worse ???
Good to hear that you’re ok!
Hope the rest of your fishing adventure will be fun -
We've got the tilt mech off the engine and taken it apart as far as we need to.
This is the solid stainless steel axle around which tilt/trim unit pivots. It's a solid rod of 316 stainless steel and is supposed to be straight
The forces that went through that poor engine are really stupifying…Good news is that we can see no other significant damage, well the engine cover took a beating when it hit the seat backrest....
The engineer has taken the unit back to his workshop for a Frankenstein rebuild. Fingers are well and truly crossed…
The other guys have gone to a local Wadi for a swim/fish, but I decided to get some R&R. I've missed out on a days fishing, need to be in as good as nick as possible when we get out again....
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And the good news, it is all fixed, and the cracks in the deck are being caulked as I type - of course, the batteries are in the compartment under the damage
The unit has been Frankensteined and the donor unit now awaits spares - it came from one of the other boats, which for reasons I have not got to the bottom of, we cant use
So, we have missed a whole days fishing, but I've lost more than that in a week to bad weather, so all is good….
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Probably, the most unlikely….
But seriously, I consider myself to be supremely lucky. I get to do some very weird and wonderful shit, and I have a wife in @Madame Buttonfly who whilst not exactly ecstatic about me doing fucking stupid stuff with people half my age (not in itself a bad thing, but I do shit that I probably should have stopped doing decades ago), puts up with it, in good grace.
