Paddling today on the river, about 3km downstream of where I last saw him, I came across the trashed carcass of my poor old Thunderbolt.
The poor thing is completely trashed. There is no way it can be fixed. It’s also full of hundreds of pounds of silt, so any attempt to drag it off the river bank and over to the other side of the river to some place where it could be recovered (like the RIT Gosnell Boathouse, which is about a hundred meters away and does have a couple of motor boats) would just cause it to sink like a stone. I should probably go and scrape off the “Baycreek Racing” stickers though, just so no blame for this disaster accrues to Bay Creek.
On the other hand, in the picture you can see a strip of duct tape leading from the side of the cockpit and a tangle of debris under the boat. That strip of tape is the last thing holding on that “tangle of debris”, which is a half-skirt and the tie down bungies from the back deck, and more importantly, the thing to which I attached my GPS. I pulled it out and the GPS was there! Pressing the power button showed the Garmin logo briefly and then it shut off, indicating that it was working but the battery was dead. After I got it home and put it in the charger, it uploaded the data from the fateful day I lost it. It appears to be working perfectly. Anybody want to buy a Garmin Forerunner 920XT?