Boating NZ November 2016

By the time most of you come to read this, the United States of America will have a new President, and the mind-numbing circus that’s choked international news channels over the last year will have ended. I hope. I won’t test my crystal-ball skills by predicting the winner, but will admit to being nervous whatever the outcome. Because this election, I think, has changed the US forever. How the world sees it, how it sees itself, how it interacts with the international community. It’s experienced a societal seismic shift. Will it still be the world’s dominant superpower? Its biggest economy? Will it have the delicacy and diplomacy required to cope with an increasingly aggressive China and a brooding Russia? Has WWIII – as some pundits are calling it – already…

Venom in Venice SOMETHING’S ROTTEN IN the city of Venice – and the locals aren’t happy. Venetians – and there are only 55,000 of them – have begun protesting against the flotilla of cruise ships that swamp their city every summer. In peak season, an estimated 30,000 cruise ship visitors arrive – every day – bringing total daily visitors to more than 60,000. The locals have had enough and have raised concerns about the sustainability of the fragile canal city and the lagoon in which it sits. They also sniff at suggestions that the cruise ship visitors bring significant wealth to the city. Most cruise ship visitors, says the Generation 90 protest group, simply take a few photographs and then go back to their ships, spending less than half-a-day in…

October’s caption winner DEMONSTRATING FOR SAFER FISHING IF YOU THINK fishing from a wave-threatened, rocky outcrop can be dangerous, spare a thought for some of South Africa’s anglers. The country’s News24 channel reports that Cape Town anglers recently staged a peaceful demonstration to protest against a rise in criminal attacks in the False Bay area. Demonstration organiser Rafeeq Marlie says thousands of anglers in False Bay are increasingly becoming victims of theft and hijacking, and that he hoped the protest would bring help from the mayor’s office and police. “Gangsters and criminals from nearby townships target us because they realise our tackle is worth money.” He says a group of fishermen fled beaches recently when they received a warning in an anglers’ Whatsapp group. “The warning said a group of…

” This is a boat that will cruise at 40 knots when the conditions are right” Three Honda V6 250hp outboards on Oona’s transom certainly don’t lack for thrust – this White Pointer has performance to burn – but their uncanny quietness turns high-speed cruising into a serene experience. White Pointer Boats and Honda Marine had to overcome a number of challenges with this vessel, including getting the boat’s balance right. With all that machinery hanging off the transom, White Pointer had to tweak the hull slightly and reposition fuel and water tanks. The team at Honda is still working through engine height adjustments and propeller selection. THREE ENGINES AND ALL THE FRUIT In every respect Oona is an impressive vessel. She’s primarily a sport-fishing boat, but equipped to the…

An item that’s been on my bucket list for many years, I was lucky enough to visit the Falkirk Wheel on a recent visit to Scotland. It’s an engineering marvel, an attractive solution for lifting canal boats between two of the country’s most historic waterways – The Forth & Clyde Canal and the Union Canal. And like many revolutionary concepts, its success lies in its simplicity and elegance. Near the town of Falkirk in central Scotland, the Wheel’s been operational since 2002 – and to appreciate its significance I need to provide a little background. The Forth & Clyde Canal opened in 1790 and the Union Canal in 1822. In the early 19th century they formed a crucial link for carrying freight and coal between Scotland’s east and west coasts.…

Anyone who’s fitted trim tabs knows how well these can work, enabling the skipper to compensate for uneven weight distribution, or to counter the tendency of some hulls to lean into the wind. Some tabs require a little fiddling to get the adjustment right, and as soon as someone moves or the wind changes direction they need to be tweaked again. Given the incredible advances in electronic accelerometers and gyroscopic stabilization (think: mobile phones and drones with cameras), it was only a matter of time before someone used these to create an automatic trim control system for boats. The Humphree X-Series is that product. The heart of the system is the central control unit containing microprocessors, tilt sensors and the accelerometer. This unit can detect roll and pitch to a…