Happy Sunday!

These were the ominous clouds that were over Maquoketa Friday that produced a deluge of rain and wind.  Thankfully no hail or sever damage were reported.  (you can click on images to reveal a larger and more detailed image.)

So to begin the story, I had a lunch meeting with some valued friends at Noon on Friday.  I also had a dinner meeting with another great Friend later in the day.  So I brought my camera and drones along to fill up the time between the two meetings.

I stopped at a variety of places to shoot video and drone video and I’ll post those at a later date.  All the time I was capturing images and video I noticed the clouds building up and getting more and more foreboding.

As I headed back to town I noticed a group of farm tractors traveling in line so I decided to follow them.  Turns out there was a large numbers of tractors that had been traveling through some towns in Jackson County and they had all stopped at Maquoketa High School, presumably for dinner.

Well I thought this would be a wonderful video for the drone to fly over so I parked about a block away so I wouldn’t be in the way and launched my drone

Well this is what happened.  The drones have forward, backward, and downward safety sensors but not sideways sensors.  So I backed the drone up to get all the shot and slide into the side of one of the legs of the tower.

So I had to walk about a block and a half to see if I could find the drone.  I found it alright but it was behind the fence that protected the water tower.  I could see that it was missing one of it props but hoped I could fly it out of the grass and the fence.  NOPE!

So I called a dear friend of mine who called one of the city crews.  So thanks to my friends Chris and Shelby plus Jeff who was so gracious to interrupt his day off to help me I was able to retrieve my crashed drone.

Now for the good news.  The prop that I thought had broken off was just folded into the side and was just find.  Very minor body damage to the drone itself.  After three hours of drying and installing new propellers on the drone it was ready to fly again.

That’s it.  Like a friend of mine said if you fly drones enough you’re going to crash one.  Unfortunately I’ve had more than my share of crashes. A dear Friend of mine might say that people like me shouldn’t have drones.  🙂

Enjoy your day and be careful.