Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i Practical Boat Owner

Send us your local news stories. Email PBO news editor Katy Stickland at pbo@ti-media.com, tel: 01252 555213, or write to the address on page 5 SOUTH COAST AND CHANNEL ISLANDS SOUTHAMPTON WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT IN DOUBT A £450 million development deal for the Royal Pier Waterfront at Mayflower Park in Southampton has been terminated by the city council. The plan to revamp the waterfront included reclaiming land from the River Test for a hotel and casino, and the construction of flats, shops and a market. The council signed a deal with RPW (Southampton) Ltd in 2014. It has not revealed why it has now abandoned the agreement, but said it would work with neighbouring waterfront landowners to explore “deliverable development plans” for the waterfront site. Mayflower Park has been – and…

Buying a boat is a long-term proposition that needs careful thought and preparation. Yet secondhand boats have never been cheaper in real terms and since the economic crunch of 2008, after which many brokerage boats were sold to continental Europe or Scandinavia, there’s less pressure on UK moorings. Granted, if you want a full-service marina in a hugely popular spot it will be pricey, but waiting lists for economically priced moorings that once ran into many years are now a thing of the past for boats under 30ft, even in some Solent locations. Waiting lists can also be surprisingly short even for larger, deep draught vessels. Try not to get hung up over an exact class or design. Smart buyers know it’s more important to focus on the condition and…

Late in 2015, just as James Oakley was finishing the hull of his home-built aluminium speedboat, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “I’d been to see my doctor for something minor when the nurse advised me to have a blood test,” he recalls. “This indicated an abnormally high reading of PSA and I was recommended to have a biopsy.” James was advised there was a tiny chance of infection, but what he didn’t anticipate was being woken three nights in a row, delirious with acute sepsis. After specialist treatment in a local hospital to deal with the infection, he chose to have surgery, but doctors warned he might not make it to Christmas. “While it was devastating news I just wanted to have the operation as soon as possible so…

Wherever you find boats, you will find boat restoration projects. From patching up an old dinghy to rebuilding a topsail schooner, many will result in a magnificent vessel, while some will never be completed. But how often does a boat considered fit for scrap actually end up looking good as new again? Not very often, yet in the past six years that’s just what’s happened in the Kent fishing town of Hastings… not once, but twice! The story starts in 2012 when local antiques dealer Dee-Day White (that’s his real name – and no prizes for guessing the year of his birth) was invited to a farm a few miles from Hastings with a view to purchasing some antiques: a gun, a table… and a boat. The gun and the…

In 2015 I decided to take the plunge and buy the family a boat. Of course, when I say ‘family’, I mean ‘me’. I live almost in the centre of the UK, with big aspirations, young kids, a reluctant wife and a limited budget, so the vessel had to meet certain key criteria: it had to be towable behind my Ford Focus, big enough to accommodate the whole family on day sails, small enough that I could single-hand it, including overnighting, and cheap enough that I could smuggle it under my wife’s financial scrutiny radar. The result was a Westerly Nimrod swing keel trailer-sailer, picked up for £1,400 and known to us as Doreen. Being an old boat (a year older than my 40-something years) I expected Doreen might need…

Across the sea of gleaming fibreglass and rainbow flags, three foreboding masts slunk into view. While brokers adjusted lines and polished hulls, Russian frigate Shtandart ghosted towards the pontoons at the Southampton International Boat Show. From the weathered canvas sails to the crew clambering across the yard arms, everything about her seemed authentic; menacingly so. Even the enormous cruise liner was diminished in her presence. The original man-of-war, built by Peter the Great in 1703, was designed to drive fear into the hearts of onlookers. But the 1999 replica is a jolly ship, which takes young crew of all nationalities around the world. “We try to sail everywhere,” said volunteer crew Sandrine Bonzine. A graphic designer by trade, she loves sleeping in the hammock and getting away from it all,…

Email pbo@ti-media.com or write to us at the address on page 5. Photos are appreciated, letters may be edited. On the subject of DIY… I read with interest your note about the MCA and Marine Guidance Notices, and especially about owners of boats doing their own maintenance. Over the years you have featured many articles that I’ve found most helpful on the subject of boat repairs and maintenance: most especially because of the ‘can do’ attitude displayed in these articles. So, yes, I tackle anything that needs attention, or goes wrong on my yacht, and have a healthy mistrust of my engine. Doing the work myself has induced a state of constant vigilance and early intervention for any perceived problems. It alarms me that the MCA is introducing the idea…

It is now 30 years since I first sailed to the northern Biscay coast and fell in love with that beautiful and varied coastline. Like many others, my aim was simply to head south to warmer climes, so I had just a taster of its charm and beauty. On retiring in 1999, I repeated the trip, and in 2015 had the urge to do it all again. However, if I wished to return to northern Spain it would have to be soon while I was still capable of making such a trip in my Elizabethan 23, Reservation. My previous route, a three-day crossing of the Bay from the Raz de Sein, had proved ideal, and this time I could visit extra ports and enjoy more time in those I liked…

Living aboard a sailing yacht in the city is not normal, not even for boaties. Central London is awash with houseboats of varying types but not many that have sails and hardly anything that actually goes to sea. Last year we sold our 41ft Beneteau, Nereid, after nearly eight years as liveaboards. We learned plenty in that happy time, sailed all season, and still went to work in our suits! Now Alice and I have had time to reflect, we thought we’d share our experience. Believe it or not, when we bought Nereid we had not a clue. We had her delivered from Plymouth and joined the delivery crew at Dover for the first of many trips up the Thames. When they tied her up in St Katharine Docks and…

Having a heater on a small boat might seem like overkill, but I wouldn’t be without one. Quite apart from extending your sailing season, it keeps crew happy, and keeps the inside of the boat fresh and dry – and that’s worth the extra diesel use, slight current draw and the minimal space the heater takes up. The Eberspächer D1LC on my Impala 28, Polly was installed in around 1991 and had given many years of faithful service. But in recent years it had begun to develop more and more faults. The controller, the fuel pump and the ECU all failed in turn – and when it refused to start I decided that, much like an old car coming up to an MOT where a large amount of money will…

Got a question? Email pbo@ti-media.com Here’s just a selection of the latest questions from PBO readers. Email or write to the address on page 5 and our experts will answer your queries ELECTRICS Solar or wind? Q I have a 1998 Beneteau Oceanis 381 that has two 12V batteries for the house and one for the engine. Off the house batteries I run the usual array of navigational instruments, water pumps and lighting, but also have autopilot, radar and fridge. These last three items I run rarely as I am constantly concerned about running down the house batteries. I nearly always turn off the engine battery when under lengthy sail so as to be sure I can always start the engine when required. So, which is best to help charge…

Readers’ cruising destinations, near and far We pay for your published cruising stories and harbour updates. Email pbo@ti-media.com or write to the address at the top of page 5 My husband and I are avid racers, competing in everything from dinghies to keelboats, and we’ve always eschewed the idea of long-distance cruising. But being at the St Maarten Heineken Regatta earlier this year – we were working as race reporters for the event – showed us a way to combine the two: the fun of racing and regatta socialising, followed by a cruise on to the next island in time for the next regatta. We’re obviously not the first to think of this. It’s a well-established formula and the Caribbean Sailing Association is the go-to organisation if you want to…

Boatbuilding and restorations always take longer than they are supposed to. The first Project Boat in PBO – the restoration of a Snapdragon 23 bought for £500 on ebay – started in 2011 and was only intended to take a year, but took three. Project Boat 2 has been running on and off for three years already and if all goes to plan, Harvey, the home-build Secret 20, will be launched early next season. The reception at the Southampton Boat Show 2019 was fantastic with hundreds of visitors to the stand – even on the final rainy Sunday. The Secret 20 is a build-your-own kit imported from Australia that has been constructed in two distinct phases. The frames and the hull were laid in the PBO garage in Poole by…

www.sailingscenes.co.uk In the frenetic yet halcyon days of fast-selling Hunter Sonata and Impala cruiser-racers, I foolishly regarded bilge keels as performance sapping abominations. I thought they looked like casually designed afterthoughts sprouting beneath nice hulls and assumed that their sole purpose was to stand a boat on its own two feet. The boats that our company built, on the other hand, were aimed at people we thought of as serious sailors – and we rashly believed that anything other than a state-of-the-art fin or lifting keel flyer would be unlikely to satisfy them. But when my personal circumstances underwent a change, I had to think again. Ignoring my prejudices, I spent my own hard earned cash on a second-hand bilge keeler. Why, you may well ask? Simple. My factory and…

Everyone, it seems, loves a trailer-sailer. With mooring costs on the increase and disposable income on the decrease (according to the Office of National Statistics), it makes a lot of sense to build or buy a boat you can pop on a trailer and ‘moor up’ on your driveway. The annual cost of mooring my little 25ft wooden sloop at Brighton marina five years ago was upwards of £2,500 per year, and you have to do a lot of sailing to justify that expenditure. We didn’t, and eventually sold the boat rather than fork out more money. All of which explains why the market for pocket cruising boats under 20ft – particularly those you can build at home – is so busy. There’s everything from William Garden’s Eel and Iain…

On my return from Fraser Island, off the Australian Queensland coast, I stopped over at Mooloolaba. By chance I met Jim, a Canadian yachtsman aboard his boat Island Orix. After an amicable chat, we decided to sail in company south towards Sydney, some 687km away. Both solo sailors, we agreed that our first port of call should be Southport, just 172km away. There are two routes to reach Southport: one through the inland waterway of Moreton Bay and the other, southwards along the eastern coast. The inland waterway is notorious for sandbars and as Island Orix draws 1.5m and my 38ft Roberts yawl Sandpiper 1.2m, we decided on the safer coastal passage. The weather forecast was ideal for what was to be a 24-hour trip, so we set out the…

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has had a strong presence in Kent, saving lives at sea in the county since 1826 with eight lifeboat stations currently operating. From the involvement of the Ramsgate and Margate crews in the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940 to the establishment of the Gravesend station in 2002 in response to the Marchioness disaster Kent has a rich and noble lifeboat history that is celebrated in the RNLI Historic Lifeboat Collection. Housed in the Chatham Historic Dockyard, the historic lifeboat gallery boasts the largest collection of lifeboats in the United Kingdom. The most recent addition is The Spirit of Lowestoft, a Tyne class lifeboat that was involved with a spectacular rescue in 1996 that resulted in its coxswain, John Catchpole, being awarded a bronze RNLI medal. However,…

Option 1 (purple line) I could take the air from a redundant vent in the cockpit, but Eberspächer’s Matthew Birks warned against this as it could lead to salt water entering the heater from spray or waves over the deck, seriously shortening its life. Option 2 (yellow line) I could take a long intake to the port side cabin aft bulkhead and bring the intake air from there Option 3 (green line) I could take ducting forward from the heater and install an intake vent on the cabin bulkhead. This was preferable as it would be the shortest pipe length. Ultimately, this was the one I chose – but I still used 75mm ducting on the intake to extend the available ducting. Note, the red line shows the run of…