My UH12R : In Action!

UH12R In Action!

						I had just finished the final touches of construction in October of 1998 and had taken the 12R down to my father's house to get his assistance in tuning the Hirth 2-stroke thrust engine. After fitting the air intake with a splash guard and and tuning it with the best jets, I was raring to get out on the water but the only water for hundreds of miles was the low, narrow, Dolores River. Feeling my oats, I decided to give it a go. This picture shows me skimming by the area where we launched the craft.
						The run was farely short. I ran down from the launch site a little ways and turned around where I am when this picture was taken.
		And then I'd run up past the launch site under a bridge a little ways past where these pictures were taken, turn around and head back down.
						Looks like I'm having fun huh? Well, after a couple of runs, I came up over a little section of rapids and around the corner towards the bridge where I kinda lost control and hit the bridge pillar (the one on the left in the pictures above). Sorry, suffered too much mental trauma to record that part. The 12R got a crunched starboard bow corner and the lift engine sheared off and would have sunk in the river if not for the duct guard and battery cables. About 20 hours of reconstruction later, the craft was stronger and better than new and ready for another adventure.
						So, in June of 1999 after the reconstruction, I went out on a little lake near (30 miles away, actually) my house called Highline Reservoir. The lake wasn't terribly crowded that day but there was a fair amount of wind. Because the ramp area was pretty small and with me being a novice, I had a little trouble lining up with the dock to go up the ramp. In this picture, I'm putting around in displacement mode (no lift air) so that I wasn't affected so much by the breeze while attempting to approach the dock.
						Here I am buzzing around out on the lake.
						This is a zoomed-in view of me from the picture above. All in all, it was a good trip except for a few inconveniences such as a very fine dust that was around the ramp parking area that made hovering between the trailer and the ramp a very dirty affair. Bystanders didn't seem to like it either when the wind blew the cloud in their direction. I have since outfitted my trailer with a winch that allows me to load and unload the craft quickly by myself so that I can theoretically back the trailer to the water and launch and load the craft like a boat thus avoiding dusty parking areas.