We bought a new four-wheeler last year, and so began my hard-learned lessons about how not to ride them.

We took the quad to Newfoundland last year when we went there for vacation. One one of our trips into the wilderness, we crossed a very watery bog. There were three machines, two adults, one teenager, and three kids. Each machine took its turn getting stuck which was promptly resolved by one of the other machines hooking up and quickly towing it out. At one such incident, I was riding my new machine, which had less than 500 kms on the odometer, behind the other two. The first one went through a particularly water-soaked section of bog, but got through. The second machine went through in the same track, digging the ruts a little deeper. I decided that I wouldn’t follow in the same track. I figured that it I straddled a little to the side, I’d have an easier time of it. Boy, was I wrong! My right hand side stayed on solid bog but… what I thought was marshy moss under my left wheels was simply moss floating on top of a fairly deep water gully. The quad promptly sunk and sunk good. I had to remain leaning off the right side of the machine so it wouldn’t roll right over. Check out the short video below showing how deep I was.

Did you notice that the exhaust was bubbling out from under water at the back of the bike?

Well… it took us a fairly long time getting my machine out of this mess. We were about 45 minutes ride from the nearest help, so I was pretty anxious to get it out on our own. We tried all the conventional methods, but we eventually achieved success by letting the winches out on all three machines and hooking them to each other. Then, we all drew the winches back in. At the same time, the other two machines had their machines in reverse while I used four-wheel, locked-in-low to drive forward. The video below is edited down to shorten the duration, but it does give you an idea of the struggle we had getting out. It still makes me nervous watching it!