Boating chit chat thread.

https://afloat.ie/blogs/sailing-saturday-with-wm-nixon/item/62951-royal-irish-yacht-club-puts-head-above-parapet-for-admiral-s-cup-revival

RIYC making a tilt at next year's Admiral's Cup!

I didn't know of this award, but if I had I'd have added my voice to the chorus... I couldn't think of a more deserving recipient!

Congrats! 👏👏

It's a bit of a health & safety gone mad report from that article.

I know nobody involved. I fully agree MOB exercises should be a regular event.The MCIB report makes very sad reading, peppered with trite platitudes and cliches. Sadly its overall tone, instead of helping, drives another wedge between the MCIB and the sailing community. It shows the ignorance of an investigator not just of what happens on the bow of a racing yacht, but on yacht racing in general. Tethers are deadly, you are much more likely to trip and fall overboard wearing one. (See comments on them & recoveries in the 1979 Fastnet report.) The yacht JB was close to a lee shore when a crew slips and is partly in the water. The skipper makes a call that the priority is to recover the bowman. Forty seconds laterthe boat went on the rocks. The investigator makes a song an dance about not dropping the main - how the f was the yacht to get off the lee shore with a sail on its prop? Pitiable reading, annoying to think that its writer is a senior civil servant drawing >100k a year and will get a pension to match. Well done to the skipper & crew in recovering the bowman.

Was that Conor McGregor by any chance? as they are now a family of international yachtsmen..

Made a schoolboy error when I launched a few weeks back and I left the power on.. (weekday so was in a hurry to get back to my desk), then went away for 3 weeks so never had the chance to correct my mistake…. Went down on Saturday to give her decks/cockpit a power wash and realised the batteries were flat…. So brought down a trickle charger yesterday to see if I could get a pulse from them again but it wasn't looking good, so I dispatched my better half to Halfords to pick up one of those booster engine starters…. hooked it up and she came to life, and the engine fired on the button…. those boosters are great bits of kit…

Now for some good weather this bank holiday weekend to hopefully catch one of the 2 airshows that are happening.. Saturday and a spin down to Bray looks the better option.

Yeah I'm ashamed to say that yesterday was my first spin of the season too, and I literally just left Malahide and went out around the safe water mark and came back in, as I just wanted to run the engine under load for an hour or so to get a bit of charge back into the batteries…

You're out of Greystones aren't you? so it's a handy enough spin for you…. I'd be looking at at least 3 hours each way to get there but thankfully would have the tides with me both ways…

Do you know roughly what the depth is where they keep the spectator boats? Looking on the charts I see around 20m? as I only have a combined 30m of chain/rode… so not sure anchoring will be an option for me unless it's fairly calm…

If you have lead batteries, they are likely damaged from being discharged fully and left. Keep an eye on them for the winter.

When I put the Lidl trickle charger on the circuit it was showing around 5.2V

After jumping the engine, I ran it for a good hour and when I came back in the batteries were reading about 12V (after I stopped the engine), so I think I may have caught it ontime…

They wouldn't have depleted immediately, so I'm hoping they lasted a week or 2 before going flat, and then hopefully they weren't sitting in that state for too long… maybe 1-2 weeks

There's a culture of violence fostered and encouraged in club racing! When acts of violence on the course routinely go unpunished and when successful county sailors regularly avoid jail for violent assaults, what do people expect?

😂😂😂

Although, all jokes aside, it was a very violent and vicious assault. I hope the victim can recover.

Remember folks, violent psychopaths come from all walks of life!

Think I've only anchored 3-4 times over the last 6 years, so definitely not worth the hassle/cost of installing a windlass in my use case… and on those previous occasions, I was in no more than 3-4m of water, on relatively calm days so I'd already have probably half my 10m of chain on board before the anchor came off the bottom… whereas on Saturday, I was hauling all 10m of chain and the anchor itself up, and I think the anchor (CQR) was fairly well dug in as it took a fair bit of effort to 'pop' it free.. I was certainly feeling it in my hamstrings on Sunday!!!

This was on sailing anarchy, security camera from around that area at

the time

Probably. Once your out at sea and don't hit anything you should be fine. Unless she was knocked over and lost her keel. Maybe under sail and lost her keel. Or the rudder stock snapped and ripped a hole in the hull.

I wonder if she is more of a gin palace than a proper yacht.

Anyone wanna take a guess at which point my engines seawater pump stopped pumping water yesterday on our little spin out of Malahide…?

The exhaust suddenly sounded funny and I noticed the amount of water coming out rapidly decreasing, so made an about turn to get back to the marina as gently as I could… Luckily for me the engine has an isolated cooling system like a car, but instead of a radiator, the coolant flushes through a heat exchanger where it's cooled by the seawater, so I knew I could probably run it gently for maybe 20-30 minutes… the tide had started to ebb and if I didn't get back in asap I'd be pushing into 3-4 knots of it trying to get in 2 hours later!

I'm guessing the impeller has shredded itself, as I was fully expecting it to do so given I've not changed it in 6 years, so it's entirely my own fault… The cap on one of the 4 screws holding the cover plate had long since corroded away so I reluctantly didn't want to try and change the impeller for fear of not being able to put it back on properly and seal it…. but my hand has now been forced.

I ended up ordering a complete new water pump this morning as I've always wanted to have a spare, so will fit the new one, and re-condition the old one and perhaps drill out the broken bolt and replace them all with something a bit meatier… (and something I can get a spanner on as I hate using flat head screws for things like this…

The keel compensates for the mast, If a sailing boat loses its keel then the boat is top heavy and she would flip over. A yacht sails better on her side as there is less surface on the water. Imagine that mast at a 45 degree angle or more, in theory the boat should capsize but due to the weight of the keel it stops it from doing that. Compare it to a see saw

@AndyBoBandy Six years?😯 ☺️Usually they're made of rubber and perish. I'd also check the intake filter. Does your heat exchanger have a built-in sacrificial anode? Lots do, it's an add-on if you are ordering stuff.

The Balesian had a large entryport in her port quarter. She also had a sliding keel, no comments yet as to whether or not the former was closed or the latter fully extended. Bayesian fell over, had her mast in the water and went down almost immediately. Those in the liferaft climbed into it from the sea, the couple with the baby already were on deck.

This is the ship that was anchored ahead of her, skipper had to motor to maintain station at anchor. Plenty of windage there, even if they had struck their topmasts down on deck.

Homepage - Segelschiff Sir Robert Baden Powell (sir-robert.com)

You can take powerboat lessons anywhere pretty much… theres a sailing school in Dun Laoghaire (INSS), and even a place Ringsend that do it now… for what you want to do, it might even be overkill, but you will learn and understand the basics, especially when it comes to safety…

Radio - handheld marine VHF is your man (VHF operators cert is required, but not having it wouldn't mean they won't rescue you if you need rescuing). Cheap ones start off around £62 on Amazon.. better ones are north of £150

Retevis RM01 VHF Marine Radio, IP67 Waterproof Walkie Talkie, Vibration Floating 88 Channels Handheld Radio for Kayaking Fishing Boating (Black, 1 Piece): Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Icom-Waterproof-Handheld-Marine-Radio-Blue/dp/B015VWB4OC/ref%3Dsr_1_4?crid=1PPCCEVDVYURB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.kcpV9xam0AjupUoP3PJrxAfgf32pshsdZwJ-mbF0HC9WtITJTTJVC0GZU6dchsZxGk3YfXnFVdNhqLoQjR_tkmFjgxk2MdniuiNyrtwZzuINodzcfrN2Y8s7kYUIqcbIEOTdUI06K-de62bjif1vBRdd_QRk3DN_uh2cUDdTZJIQQEho1g53Fb_cNF8pig2oeLsHoWiyAczhgOm364ZiI4QVLg43nqXaPvyqwBl-StQ.PkJ8R0FgOX8DHC_DYyrVaAqt2kgGlY6C50W5k8t_JWw&dib_tag=se&keywords=handheld%2Bmarine%2Bvhf&qid=1724166802&sprefix=handheld%2Bmarine%2Bvhf%2Caps%2C190&sr=8-4&th=1

Then the even more expensive ones have DSC & even AIS on them, but for you, mostly overkill (however DSC is an excellent feature whereby when activated, it sends out your details & position to all DSC VHF radios in range before you even transmit your MayDay call).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/IC-M94-RADIO-MARINE-TRANSCEIVER-RECEIVER-Black/dp/B095L6VKJM/ref%3Dsr_1_5?crid=3QDNDQ2BYRN2D&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.39Yf9OLsoFnI92ZgmCu8XoF14qrIzsCGOseumqsfrXov87gejOp45b3zYwTKf5DhG3acDU34atYOtXqHcnNaz4vH1MHGVRvJ2b2YFTJ52oVeHF0Z3Ihe2-pCW_PqeL44JpdbSaMiAnADrzVRevAQstDAFN7cDrUr1saJVhHVPA0FqBnTSh_pzBQDYKhoIBxjiVm0u7C0q0EBUDt1R3ubyNGQPZpKUfPCyQovRPampgU.eVxFFyxJT9BTCUt7KBaWCKoEIdzYCUS-Om5Qj5NvqBY&dib_tag=se&keywords=handheld+marine+vhf+dsc&qid=1724166858&sprefix=handheld+marine+vhf+dsc%2Caps%2C56&sr=8-5

Nav - Smartphone with Navionics boating app (and a subscription to Irish waters) and that'll more than cover for what your doing (would even be overkill)

‎Navionics® Boating

Another really handy and really cheap bit of safety kit you'd want is a PLB.. much cheaper (& smaller) than having an EPIRB.. and for your use case, the 24hours of signal they put out would more than suffice. I'd say you wouldn't be long losing phone signal out on the west coast…

https://marineparts.ie/ocean-signal-plb1-the-worlds-smallest-plb/