I was going to post this in the review thread, but it is really more of a story about some really great guys doing what anyone of you would have done if you got the call.


Well one of my guys from the shop got to run one of our new 1866 Phowler Extreme boats Friday night into Saturday. It was an unusual test run to say the least, but I thought we would post it up for folks to see.

I was on the road out east delivering boats when I got the call friday night from Bill Pauly, one of my welder at the shop. They had 10+ " of rain here from Friday into Saturday morning and a number of area dams had failed or were on the brink of failing. The towns of Mt. Carroll IL, Savanna IL and three other towns in eastern Iowa were all flooding badly (you might have seen the images of the Lake Delhi damn failing in Iowa, that is just north of us). Bill is on a volunteer fire department near Savanna. None of the local boat dealers up there would offer a boat to assist in evacuation and rescue, so they called Bill and asked if he would come up with one of our Phowler/Prodrive rigs. Boats have been going out of here so fast the last two months that all we had rigged for ourselves was an 1866 with our 2N1 Blind and stock 36 PD on it in the showroom. The guys popped the blind off in 10 minutes and Bill head up to Savanna.

The lower part of town had 10-18' of water rushing in, cars and houses under water and train cars were floating. Bill said the most he had in the boat was 7 people at one time for safety in the fast water. The boat planed and ran 16-22mph depending on direction. Bill is no small guy, 280. Even against the full raging current the boat handled well and could get on top and run fully loaded. Only had one nail biter he said, got caught in a spot were the water was coming over a retaining wall between houses and cut rolling back creating an upswell of turbulent dirty water. Said the boat just sat there for a bit with motor cavitating in the dirty water until he could turn her enough to get into some clean running water so she would bite, then he went right up and over the top. He said it was a little unnerving sitting there at WOT and the boat is just standing still with the front drifting over and back just trying to keep it pointed up stream until he could work it off to one side and get the prop to bite in clean running water.

These are about the toughest conditions you can run in. Bill hit the roofs of two cars, prop actually cut the roof on one of them, ran through fences, mail boxes, over anything you can imagine floating in flood waters. Bill and his volunteers pulled a total of 18 people off house tops and checked a total of 85 houses to make sure everyone was out.

They got a big thank you from the locals and the DNR wanted to confiscate the boat permenantly.

Thanks to Bill Pauly and the volunteers for their hard work, they saved lives that night. My only wish is that we had had more boats at the ready as we had a total of five towns completely flooded over the weekend and we were the only ones who offered a shallow water rescue boat.


Thanks Bill,

PW

Great job. We are in the process of trying to get our own boats for shallow water rescue here. I spent a couple days in the spring with he coast guard dart team up in Memphis to see their operation. They were using 15' wareagles with Honda outboards. I'm trying my best to convince the powers to be that we need to go the custom boat and MM route with our package.

Good story with a good outcome ...... thanks fo sharin' !!!!

Amazing story and great effort --- way to go ! ! !

Hope nature calms down a bit and everyone can get things back to normal.....

Good Story....

dat is awesome great to hear something like dat and someone willing to risk themselves for others! sounds like a pretty good rig too..

Cool deal.... There was one of your boat packages helping out in the rescue efforts back in May after the flooding we had here in West Tennessee.. Word was it also did really well in the swift water...

My Dept is also looking at getting a boat for such disasters....

Cool story. Thanks.

That was Cutt-Down, our rep down there running that boat. He pulled in 11 folks that day, unfortunately Tim had to spend the second day helping look for a body that was missing.

Kudos Paul BUT you know what, I wouldnt have expected anything less from you !