The Sinking of ‘Merica – RIP

Well, word seems to have gotten around now about the fact that I managed to sink my boat the weekend following Memorial Day. The week afterward was very hard financially, emotionally, and physically, but I received a pretty big outpouring of moral support from friends, family, and fellow anglers (many of which I have never even personally met). So I wanted to throw a big THANK YOU out there to everyone who has reached out to me since then. Ya’ll have been great. There’s been a lot of questions, and I’ve been promising to “tell the tale,” so here it is… (as told on austinbassfishing.com shortly after the incident)

“Headed out this past Friday afternoon (about 1:30PM) on Lake Austin with a good friend of mine to spend the evening on Lake Austin. This was the first time I’d been on Lake Austin since the rain and floods earlier in the week, so the goal was to go out and check water conditions and see if the heavy rains had messed with my primary pattern that has been working for a few weeks now out there. Before getting straight into my primary pattern though, there was a few other spots/patterns I wanted to check out first. Started near the mouth of Bull Creek and spent about 45 minutes in there fishing around all of the recreational boats and swimmers floating around on the flat there. Tried several different baits. My buddy managed to catch a 2.5lber on a wacky-rigged senko, and I caught one about the same size and another dink on a buzzbait. After catching the fish on the buzzbait, I decided to run further down the lake to test the buzzbait bite on some shorelines down there. The sun had come out nicely just before we had gotten on the water and the surf boats were showing up quickly. Heading down the lake, I started seeing some floating debris here and there from the week’s rains, but nothing that looked too serious… a couple bigger pieces occasionally though. The water was pretty rough from all of the surf boats so it made it difficult to see any upcoming debris. As we were battling the surf wakes, I heard an unusual thud and felt something bump the hull. It made me cringe slightly, but it didn’t seem like anything terrible. Everything felt fine and nothing seemed to be running unusually. As we stopped at our spot, my automatic bilge pump kicked on and started pumping water. A pretty normal occurrence around all the boat traffic, but knowing we had hit something moments ago, I sat and watched. Just as I started thinking, ok, it’s been running a little longer than it should for just taking some wash over the back from boat traffic… it sputtered out and stopped pumping water. Huh, I guess we just took on a little more water than normal over the back.

We continued to fish, checking out a few areas with the buzzbait and I managed to catch 3 or 4 more fish in the 1-2 pound range. My buddy also caught a few dinks on the senko and I caught a few small ones on the PowerTeam Lures JP Hammer Shad. After a few hours and a few spots later (the bilge pump had still never turned back on), I said, ok, I’ve had enough messing around, let’s go check out the pattern I’ve really been catching ’em on. We made a short run and started fishing up shallow… me throwing a River2Sea BullyWa and he still the senko. Just as I said, “Ok, we should be getting into the juice now…” I stick a 3lber on the frog. Next cast a 2.5lber on the frog. Two casts later a 4lber on the frog. Then I see a pair of 5+ pounders and I tell my buddy to cast his senko up there. He’s off target by about 5ft, but one of ’em runs over and sucks up the senko anyway. 5lber in the boat. Looks like my pattern is still workin’! We fish there a bit more, but looks like we did our damage there. At that point I decided it was time to run to the upper end to see what the water was looking like up there.

Now it was somewhere around 7 PM. We’re running up the lake, everything still seems fine with the boat. We start running through one of the roughest sections of the lake… the section that Ski Shores is located on. There’s ski and surf boats all over the place and the waves are just bouncing everywhere off the retaining walls. Just as we pass Ski Shores, we hit a big wake, and IMMEDIATELY something feels horribly wrong. I take my foot off the hot foot… bilge pump is running… and it just feels like we are taking on water. Just up ahead I see the little creek opening up on the left with the shallow sandbar at the mouth. I romp down on the hot foot to get us over there and onto the sand bar. The boat is bogging down bad and has slowed way down, but we manage to barely make it to the sandbar. I jump up and lift up the back hatch to check for water. Water is already 1/3 of the way up the batteries.

The night got really long from that point. I had my buddy bailing water trying to keep it off of the batteries while I started making phone calls to find a tow boat. He managed to keep the water off the batteries for only about 5 minutes before wake after wake from surf boats completely swamped the back end and the flooded it all and the bottom of the boat started filling up as well. I wasn’t terribly worried about it though because I knew we weren’t going to sink any further than we already had being beached on the sand bar. But still, those surf boats managed to dump A LOT of water in my boat. The tow company was a bit of a disaster and spent all night running around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off… basically all of the equipment they were supposed to have in their boat, wasn’t in their boat. They were frustrated with the situation too. Finally at 10 PM they decided to take us back to the ramp and said, “We’ll text you when we get the boat off the water and on the trailer.” They ended up having to wait for more guys to get there with the proper equipment. Got a text message from them at 5:45 AM saying they got the boat off the water.

The damage was much worse than we all thought it was. The initial impact on the lower end of the lake must have caused a small fracture in the hull. As we continued to drive around the lake, just the force of the water started taking off pieces of the laminate exposing the fiberglass. Hitting the few big wakes around Ski Shores must have been the final blow and taken off a few large chunks of laminate and punched through the fiberglass. I ended up with about a 2ft x 8ft strip along the bottom of the boat where the laminate was completely torn off and fiberglass shredded.

As such, I’m out of business for a little while until I can get all of this sorted out. Insurance has determined the boat a total loss and will be cutting me a check. I certainly have some obstacles to overcome with getting a new boat though, so it is yet to be determined when I’ll be back in business guiding again. It could be a week… it could be a couple months… really hard to say right now. Thanks again everyone for the encouragement and support the past few days. Hopefully I’ll have good news soon.”