I tried the fishing pole. That was a failure. Then I tried the RC boat. I thought I had the perfect plan. Tie fishing string to boat. Release line on pole. Drive boat around plane and drive back to shore. Pull fishing line in with plane. Except it turned out:
Run and get boat (plane floating away in wind), tie fishing line onto boat (plane floating away), drive out to plane (plane getting far away), circle plane and drive back to shore (fishing line pulls under plane and plane is so far away its pointless). My final retrieval method that day was to walk 30 minutes to other side of lake and wait additional 45 minutes until the plane washed ashore. This was a 1/2a size boat plane and although being cub yellow for a while I lost sight of it and didn't know if it sank or not. Apparently my monokote job was good and held the water out. The rc boat worked great pushing it the last 10 feet to the shore down wind.[
] The funniest part was my landing was deadstick (ran out of fuel) but with the 10 mph winds I had a perfect landing 5 feet from the dock. I could have almost reached out and grabbed it. Should have just jumped in instead of running back to my car for the rc boat.