The Goldfish Club... (Where wet rocketeers get to share)

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You win the best photo prize. Never seen a lawn dart in a pond.

You mean like this:

Not my rocket. Happened a year ago September. My water recovery was MUCH deeper. :facepalm: Armpit deep in lovely swamp water. :smile:

Adrian
 
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Hey..if a "creek dart" was good enough for Homer Hickam and the Rocket Boys, I see nothing wrong with an occasional pond dart....:)
 
Hey..if a "creek dart" was good enough for Homer Hickam and the Rocket Boys, I see nothing wrong with an occasional pond dart....:)


I know that in the movie they recovered the lost rocket from a creek. However I am certain that the props department placed it there. I don't know if the real rocket landed in one though.
 
I hear those tat fly at Bong, often wear waders to the launch.

I don't own any waders, but it's been done. I have been armpit deep in a swamp, waist deep in a stream, and in weeds over my head on the same day at Bong. All for different rockets, two of which weren't even mine.
 
Healed nicely. Thanks for asking. I do have a nice remembrance in the form of a 2"x2" > on my shin. It must mean my left leg is greater than my right leg... :dark:

or it's pointing to the limb that's next? :)
 
In the early 1970's, I had a 6 foot span Swing Wing glider crash into a creek. It was easy to get and suffered little impact damage, but the water warped the wings and the pivot system, ruining it beyond fixing.

Other than that, here is the only other time I can think of, last fall, where a D powered scissor-flop wing glider landed in a pond. I did not know it had made it into the pond, then when I got closer and from a distance saw it was in the pond, oh crap.

But then I got closer and realized that while it was in the pond, it was not IN the water!

SOOhk4s.jpg


First time I've been glad I was flying a model on a cold day. Had to cobble and duct tape together about 30 feet of poles to reach that far to drag it across the ice.

It is very strange odds that of the only two times I can recall a model landing in a body of water.... both were gliders, and variable geometry gliders at that.
 
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I did a late afternoon launch at a community festival with 10,000 people in attendance. I made sure to direct the rocket away from the crowd, and that worked just fine. The area that I aimed it towards was a small industrial park that had numerous ponds. Yep, landed right in the middle of one pond. It got dark soon, so I was unable to retrieve it right away.

It was a Madcow DX3 with a cardboard tube and I though for sure that it would be ruined. When we showed up the next day we saw it laying horizontal on the water and couldn't realize why it hadn't sunk into the water. Once we got closer, it was apparent that there was reed grass just underneath the surface that was holding it up so that only about 1" of the airframe was underwater. There was barely any damage and I only had to cut off about 1" from the top of the airframe. My friend got his canoe out and retrieved it for me.
 
I put my stealth into the river at METRA. it floated! No damage but it was a bear to fish out....
 
Doh! - I forgot there were some other water landings, but they were intentional or likely results, not accidental. Did some underwater rockets launched out of an unused city pool between seasons. Sometimes the model landed in the pool (of course it got wet just by being launched out of the pool but then most of the water got "blown off" by the airflow before it could get soaked in from the launch)

There was a family vacation we made to Wisconsin in 1970 or 71, to stay at a cabin on a lake. I took some rocket stuff with me, notably a Cox Saturn-IB. I mounted some styrofoam into the nose section, and flew it off of a boat dock, angled to land in the lake. Well, the Cox IB was all plastic, so nothing to get ruined other than the chute eventually (replaced the shock cord soon after the trip ended, since it was going to rot). It flew fine, landed in the lake, and floated due to the styrofoam. Took a small boat out to get it, as planned. Fun way to get in some flying in an unusual way.
 
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Isn't there a club that does a special launch in Manitowoc WI where they launch HPR on the jetty and land them in Lake Michigan? The Coast Guard are out in rubber boats to retrieve them.
 
Isn't there a club that does a special launch in Manitowoc WI where they launch HPR on the jetty and land them in Lake Michigan? The Coast Guard are out in rubber boats to retrieve them.

I think I remember seeing that is an old issue of HPR Magazine. Hmm, I guess ALL the issues are old now.
 
as part of the 'Rockets for schools' program, yes. last I heard they used blue tube, and the rockets for the most part were undamaged by their water landings. think some woosh/ fox valley members help out.
Rex
 
Well, they may use that now, but Blue Tube wasn't a glimmer in a rocketeer's eye when the article I remember was published. But it was rockets for schools. The launch in Delaware that I mentioned earlier did that too. Don't know if they still do.
 
Hey Folks, it happened to me twice in one day. First, it was a newly built LOC 4, the flight was perfect but it drifted into a pond and worst of all I had an Eggfinder from Eggtimer Rocketry on it. Needless to say, the Eggfinder didn’t work right after that but the rocket was fine and the Eggfinder gave the exact location before it got wet. Then, an Estes Expedition rocket landed almost right in the same spot in the pond. It was a very hard build and not constructed for the water at all. Well, I went rocket fishing twice that day. Thanks for setting this up so we could tell our stories. God bless.
 
Hey Folks, it happened to me twice in one day. First, it was a newly built LOC 4, the flight was perfect but it drifted into a pond and worst of all I had an Eggfinder from Eggtimer Rocketry on it. Needless to say, the Eggfinder didn’t work right after that but the rocket was fine and the Eggfinder gave the exact location before it got wet. Then, an Estes Expedition rocket landed almost right in the same spot in the pond. It was a very hard build and not constructed for the water at all. Well, I went rocket fishing twice that day. Thanks for setting this up so we could tell our stories. God bless.

Not a problem... Thank for sharing!
 
had a Wildman sport join the frog club (no fish), this past year, by the time I got to the pond the only thing not on the bottom was the chute :). did make it interesting cleaning the motor case.
Rex
 
I haven't retrieved any yet, but I have lost plenty of rockets to the ocean over the past 3 years. My launch area is bordered by the ocean on one side and heavy scrub brush on the other. Once in awhile I get lucky and they have made it to the beach, but not the ocean. I lose a lot of rockets because it is often very windy where I fly, but there is always hope I may find them in the tall thick brush. No hope once they head out to sea. Sometimes they float for awhile before they go down or the tide rips them out of sight.
 
Flew my F.E.A.R stealth right into the river at METRA. the chute snagged something underwater and it just sat there until I got a pole, went around to the other side and down to the water. Yanked it right out, no biggie.

Helped someone else fish their rocket out, and when we dumped out the water from the fin can a catfish came out!
 
My story:
December 2018, Tripoli Tampa club launch, flying my QCC Explorer on its maiden flight. In hindsight, I should have opted for something less beefy than an E30-7 for the first flight, but I really wanted to see what that motor could do. So, up she went.

The ascent was flawless and the descent under full parachute was textbook. The only problem was that there are two massive ponds in the cow pasture that are eager to eat rockets. It was the last rocket my family and I were going to fly for the day, so we were already hot and tired. To say I was frustrated when it came down in the water is an understatement. What made it worse was the ground was so soft around the pond that I was beginning to wonder if I was going to actually make it over to the rocket. I was sinking up to my waist in mud when I took one more step and was under water to my neck. I quickly flopped back out onto the bank to remove the cell phones in my pockets when my wife made it over. It had taken me nearly ten minutes to get that far, so she looked at the pond, found a better direction to enter, strupped to her underwear and went swimming. She managed to get the rocket but couldn't maintain footing and completely submerged it a few times. Finally, we both made it out of the pond, head to toe covered in mud, and exhausted. I actually pulled a charlie horse in my right calf that had me limping for two days after.

When we got home, I discovered the 808 camera and Altimeter 3 I had on board had both lost their data, but were otherwise still functional after a good drying. As for QCC Explorer, I ordered fresh tubes and couplers from Apogee Components, and Estes was gracious enough to send me a sheet of decals for free. I'm glad I put clearcoat on that rocket because I only need to replace the decals on the forward section of the body since it was the most waterlogged and became wrinkled. The fins and intake scoops were completely undamaged.

In addition to repairs, I'm upgrading rhe design to feature a payload bay in the silver tube section.
 
Long overdue, but I’m staking my claim to a membership. Qualification flight summary here:

Flight 5: Estes Hi-Flier XL on a D12-5. I learned something incredibly important about this rocket on this flight: it floats!

It’s also large enough that I could see the fins a few hundred feet out in the water. I went swimming for it, and there was a canoeing team that was kind enough to scoop it up and meet me about halfway. This is the first time I’ve actually gone swimming to retrieve a rocket; all others were just too small or too far out to see.

Much to my dismay, the motor had taken on enough water to expand and get stuck in the motor mount. I took it home and left it to dry for a day before removing it, but it was still stuck enough that I ended up pulling out the entire motor mount.
View attachment 485129
That’s it, lying next to my Goblin decal sheet. Now I’ve got a hairdryer pointing at it and going full-blast.

I should have left it longer. The forward centering ring is still a little damp, no way were the forward end of the motor and the D-to-E adapter ring ready to come out.

That was the last flight of the day. Not too many overall, but certainly plenty of excitement and learning opportunities in that time.

The aftermath and repair job in this thread here:

Two days after splashing down with my Hi-Flier XL, the spent D12-5 motor remains as firmly stuck in the motor mount as ever. Thus far my attempts to remove it have only managed to remove the entire motor mount from the rest of the airframe, and I’d like to avoid damaging the mount if I can. Gripping the spent casing with pliers, either just on one edge or two, has failed to budge it.

So far I’ve left it to dry until the forward centering ring was stiff again. The adapter ring appears to be dry as well.

Is there something I’m missing, a trick to it, perhaps? Could the forward end of the motor still be damp and swollen and I just can’t see it? Is it possible that some of the adhesives holding the paper layers together have leached out and glued the motor to the mount tube and I’ll end up having to cut it/toss it regardless?

I’ve never managed to recover a water landing before so this is all new to me.

I’ll post an update when I get a flight out of it at ROCstock. That’ll be my final confirmation of the repair’s success or failure.
 
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