Ocean Motion: no e-stop?

Last night (10/23) I was on Ocean Motion for quite an extended period of time when it malfunctioned. The drive wheel wouldn’t shut off and kept the pendulum going for nearly a half hour. My question is this: should there not have been an e-stop to stop the drive wheel? When maintenance arrived they disabled the wheel instantly and let the boat pendulum until gravity brought it to a stop; logically, that seems like something the operator should be able to do.

Not to suggest that this was in any way terrifying (that emotion was reserved for when we were estopped on MF 3/4 of the way up at 1AM that same night) but the screeching of the teenyboppers and the 'protein spill' that occurred next to me made it a less than pleasant experience.

Holy crap, are you serious? I'm pretty nervous of swinging rides and spinning rides in general, but I was going to try to push myself to ride OM one last time this coming Sunday. I would die if I were on that ride for 30 minutes. Was it at the apex that long? How long until the girl "lost it"?

Weird. When you say the drive wheel kept spinning, did it keep going in the same direction? Or did the boat "push" its' way past the oppositely spinning wheel half of the time? Also, it took maintenance half an hour to get there?

Well, seeing that this ride will be gone in a week, I don't think it's too much of an issue. ;)

Too bad this didn't happen on the last weekend of the season. It would have been a memorable way for the ride to depart. :)

MF&WTer, I'm not sure I can answer that, but you may have answered my own question in part. As far as feeling any resistance from the drive wheel on the backside of the swing, I can't say I noticed any. Having said that, we weren't being propelled to the top of the apex every swing; just a rough guess, I would say 3/4 of the way to the top, and it stayed that way until maintenance arrived and shut everything down.

To me that would suggest that the wheel was absorbing at least some momentum every pass, because otherwise we would have been as high as we could have gone every pass, no?

To clarify, it didn't take maintenance 30 minutes to get there, I didn’t phrase that very well; the ride from start to finish was about 30 minutes; some of that time was waiting for the boat to settle after the drive wheel was finally shut off.

The 'protein spill' was about 10 minutes into it. Fortuitously, we were one row from the center; I shudder to think about the fallout from such an event had we been in the back/front of the boat.

I wonder why they could not of just turned the ride key to "off" on the control panal?

The E-Stop on Huss Swinging Ships only cuts off electric to the ride, it will not actually stop the boat. You have to let it swing to a stop. Had the same situation occur at my park last summer.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that a protein spill on Ocean Motion is far less spectacular than one on the attraction that's going to take its place...

Sort of a vomit foreshadow...

I always thought it was appropriate that the Ocean Motion seats are yellowish sort of color.

99er said:
The E-Stop on Huss Swinging Ships only cuts off electric to the ride, it will not actually stop the boat. You have to let it swing to a stop. Had the same situation occur at my park last summer.

Ya that’s what happened when maintenance got there; the wheel stopped propelling us and we just drifted to a stop.

Interestingly, when the maintenance got there he didn’t seem to do anything at all; just walked up to the control panel, touched something and instantly the wheel stopped. I suppose they could have repaired something where I couldn’t see it before he came up on the platform or perhaps only maintenance can shut off the power to the wheel (which brings me back to my original head scratcher about why the operator wouldn’t be able to do that).

My friend was in controls that day... She said it was about a 45 min. free swing... The drive wheels kept excelorating so E-Stop was pushed. The Drive wheels shut off so the ride was in free swing for the rest of the time.