Here's the whole story.
Blue circle, us. Red circle, where the bird lost power.
After a while of flying at a beautiful lake that had been drained a few months prior, the lack of a voltage alarm dropped my bird right at the red circle. I was lucky on two accounts... first being I was only about 6 feet off the ground. Second, if I have dropped 4 inches to the south, I wouldn't have this footage.
The water in the river looked shallow enough... it appeared to be only a couple inches deep all the way across. I took one step in and sank to my shins. THe water was shallow, but the silt was deep. I came to the realization that my pants would just slow me down, so I stripped to my undies and a t shirt (45 degrees here yesterday, and the water was just over freezing). After two decent steps into the 30 foot stretch of river I sank, literally, to my waist in that nasty silt. I couldn't move, and if I tried I only sank further. After about 5 minutes of deciding whether or not to call the authorities to add to my shame in a rescue, I opted to have someone throw me a big stick. A branch about 3" in diameter and 6' long was tossed to me. Using that to gain surface area I coordinated a series of pushups against the stick and wiggling like a walrus which eventually got me to the bird. It was quite a struggle, but I eventually got back across using one hand to do the little pushup trick with the branch and the other to hold the hex over my head like a torch and got me and the bird back to shore safely. It was touch and go for a while, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned... but now that it's done it's an exhaustingly hilarious story.
Yes, the camera was rolling. Yes, much of the struggle was captured in a recording, no... I won't be posting it.
The great news is I got some really wonderful footage of this drained lake, and I'm REALLY lucky it didn't go down either in the water or further into that lake bed. Even the stuff without water was like a non-Newtonian fluid, and I NEVER would have recovered it if it was an further from "shore".
