Weeds

[4x15mph]

I had my first experience with Weeds in the impellers yesterday. My son was wakeboarding and we went over a forest of weeds/trees along the river bank. The boat came to a halt after a few seconds and my son slowly sank. He was screaming at me to go since he was floating in neck high weeds. He didn't get that I couldn't move the boat up until we could finally hear one another. He is yelling at us and we were yelling back at him. It was a classic Father's day!

He got back to the boat and we went to work on pulling the weed trees out of the impellers and this could only be done from reaching under the boat. The clean out ports helped but they didn't do anything about the 5 foot weeds/trees that were sucked up into the grates and wrapped around the impeller like ski ropes.

It was a great day at the river and we will remember this ending for a long time.

Happy Father's day everyone

 

[Big Shasta]

Oh yikes...that's a worst case scenario for a jetboat. Never encountered anything like that.

Your son war right to be freaked out especially if he ever saw this movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963794/

 

[George Angelopoulos]

I had my first experience with Weeds in the impellers yesterday. My son was wakeboarding and we went over a forest of weeds/trees along the river bank. The boat came to a halt after a few seconds and my son slowly sank. He was screaming at me to go since he was floating in neck high weeds. He didn't get that I couldn't move the boat up until we could finally hear one another. He is yelling at us and we were yelling back at him. It was a classic Father's day!

He got back to the boat and we went to work on pulling the weed trees out of the impellers and this could only be done from reaching under the boat. The clean out ports helped but they didn't do anything about the 5 foot weeds/trees that were sucked up into the grates and wrapped around the impeller like ski ropes.

It was a great day at the river and we will remember this ending for a long time.

Happy Father's day everyone

Oh yikes...that's a worst case scenario for a jetboat. Never encountered anything like that.

Your son war right to be freaked out especially if he ever saw this movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0963794/

I am currently in the market for a scarab 255 but thinking twice? We live along the river, water levels drop to about 3ft where we dock our boat all summer long. Weeds and lilypads are everywhere untill we can get deep enough not to worry about them. Do you think this will be an issue for me everyone we cast off or dock & will I be able to reach down from the swim pad without going in to remove them?

 

[Matt Phillips]

I deal with Milfoil at my dock every summer. It does get into the ports and wound around the shafts and I basically have to pull the plugs and clean them out once I'm out on the lake. With the Yamaha, it takes about 5 minutes and we're off and on our way. When the lake was down six feet two years ago, it was so shallow at my slip that if I had a prop boat, I likely wouldn't have been able to get in/out at all.

 

[George Angelopoulos]

I am currently in the market for a scarab 255 but thinking twice? We live along the river, water levels drop to about 3ft where we dock our boat all summer long. Weeds and lilypads are everywhere untill we can get deep enough not to worry about them. Do you think this will be an issue for me everyone we cast off or dock & will I be able to reach down from the swim pad without going in to remove them?

Thanks, but I don't believe the Scarab has the same clean out ports? If it's a 5 minute operation once in a while but if the Scarab has no ports them it might become an issue I think.
Any Scarab owners out there ??

 

[OrangeTJ]

Weeds are kryptonite to jet boats. The cleanout ports on the Yamahas are a great feature, but it is still a PITA to have to clean out that junk and sometimes you can't get it all through the ports. When we had our SX210, at least a couple of times a year we would suck someting up - weeds, a stick, small piece of bark, etc. - and have to float around while we cleared it. When we stayed in Tahoe and docked in the keys, we'd have to stop every time we exited the marina to pull out the junk before heading out on the lake. Not the end of the world but an annoyance for sure. I don't think I would even consider owning a jet boat without the ports if I thought I might ever boat in water with weeds or other floating debris.

 

[bumpy]

I deal with Milfoil at my dock every summer. It does get into the ports and wound around the shafts and I basically have to pull the plugs and clean them out once I'm out on the lake. With the Yamaha, it takes about 5 minutes and we're off and on our way. When the lake was down six feet two years ago, it was so shallow at my slip that if I had a prop boat, I likely wouldn't have been able to get in/out at all.

Milfoil in Tahoe??!! We live on a shallow (13' at its' deepest) man made lake with a chemically controlled milfoil issue; when I was young you could almost walk 100 feet from shore on the dense matt of the stuff. I thought a deep mountain lake like Tahoe would be immune to the stuff. Please rinse the crap off and out of your boats! It sucks!

 

[BobJohnson]

@George Angelopoulos - Not a scarab owner, but a chaparral one, so basically same set up. No clean out ports and I too boat in a milfoil lake. Luckily ours only get bad in late summer and only in some areas. One being a channel I use to get from marina to lakes.

It’s the loose weeds cut up by props that get you. Run over them at no wake speed and they clog, cling to intake grates. I don’t get them in the impeller, just matted up on the grates.

Look up on here posts about “ reverse maneuver “. This is a technique where you drive in reverse, and at same time, kill engine and throw up and open reverse buckets. Forces water back through jet pumps in reverse and pushes weeds off grates. Really works.

There are also some old posts here about rakes you can make to reach under and clear grates. I haven’t come across anything yet that looks promising enough to try though.

As a side note, I’ve talked to one Yamaha guy with plugs at my marina who said getting in water or reverse move was quicker and easier to clean weeds from his grates than using his clean out ports. So he has the ports but does same thing I do. I think part of it was, it’s hard to reach all the way to the grates through a port. But that’s speculation on my part. Not dissing ports. Would love to have them as a feature on my chap if it were possible.

Can you get a lake rake and clear the weeds around your dock so you can get to deeper water weed free?

 

[OrangeTJ]

It isn’t really in Tahoe proper but rather throughout the warm and shallow Keys marina area.