AlaskanSuperduty
SDD Junior Member
I went caribou hunting in Alaska up the Dalton highway about 50 miles south of Prudhoe Bay. We trailered my brother's Sea Ark Predator (20' riverboat with 200hp Mercury Optimax) and needed to offload the boat in the Sagavanirktok (Sag) river. As I was backing WAY up, completely into the river (it's really shallow, had to go quite a ways in the river to sink the trailer far enough), the tires found little holes, truck sunk a little, and the water came up to the doors. I was able to pull forward fast enough, and we offloaded down stream a little. I parked the truck on the road, and left it for four days while we were hunting. When we came back, truck fired right up, no problems. When we went to load the boat on the trailer, I had it in four low, but the tires dug into the river bed and sunk the truck to the frame rails. The water level submerged the step bars, and it took us about 20 minutes to get her out, but she finally did it after we took the boat off the trailer. Question I have is, once the driveline took an unintentional bath in river water, is there anything I should check or change (I'm thinkin' axle grease for one). She made the trip back down to Fairbanks with no problems, no wierd sounds or vibrations, but I completely killed my stock rims when the river rocks were tumbling around them when the tires were submerged, and the rocks broke the valve stem off the front passenger side tire. At least I got a really nice caribou that I'm having a shoulder mount done on!
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