Sommaire pour December 2016 de Practical Boat Owner

It was during a lift-out last year that I noticed a gap between the keel and the hull on my Victoire 822 Fritha – a shocking sight, but as can be read in ‘Adding keel bolts for extra strength’ (PBO Summer 2016), it was nothing that couldn’t be resolved. The antifouling was also looking worn, with some patches where years of antifouling had led to a thick layer of paint, while in others the paint had worn right down to bare GRP, indicating that steps had to be taken to protect the hull. Taking the keel off meant the boat would be out of the water for an extended period of time, and also allowed access to areas of the hull which are normally covered up. It made sense therefore…

PBO is once again offering one big prize, inspired by our recommended and best-on-test items of the year. Far from being an office clearout, all the items will be brand new, sent direct to the lucky winner from the generous suppliers. One winner will be picked at random from the prize draw entries to receive all 10 products – but hurry, the competition closes on 5 December, so get your entry in as soon as possible. The winner will be able to choose the colour of their antifouling, and the sizes for their rig tension gauges, Chilly’s bottle and Habitent. Our top prize of Henri Lloyd’s top-performing Elite smock and salopettes is worth £825, and will no doubt keep you warm and dry for many winters to come. Good luck,…

You secure your house, and secure your car, with locks, keys and alarms – but the next most expensive thing you’ll ever own is, in some cases, about as easy to break into as a garden shed. You can invest in a good padlock – see our test last year in PBO 593 – or a simple screamer alarm to put thieves off, but for true peace of mind, how about a system that can let you know what’s going on and allow you to monitor your boat on her mooring? There are plenty available: most are based on SMS (text messaging), but a new generation of systems are emerging which are based on mobile data, maintaining a constant connection with a server. The major advantage of any of these…

Some recentlyorganised conferences about the recycling of ‘dead’ boats have turned the spotlight on an issue which the boating industry has to get to grips with – preferably with a good degree of self-regulation, thus avoiding the need for heavy-handed and potentially prohibitive legislation. Put quite simply, the composite construction of boat hulls from GRP (glassfibre) created a manufacturing boom, starting in the late ’50s, which led to large volumes of virtually indestructible boats flooding the market. Now, a large number of these are coming to the end-of-life or end-of-use stage at around the same time, and in most cases for reasons other than deterioration of the composite hull. Engine or rigging failure, lack of interest, lack of finance, advancing years or failing health – or combinations of all the…

If you want some new design ideas, hand the problem over to a group of youngsters. They might not have the experience to produce the complete answer without help, but they can come very close. Thus we find we have designed and produced a simplified gearbox which could have great applications as a ‘home brew’ marine unit or a cheap alternative for subsistence fishermen around the world. In design technology enrichment lessons at Sir Christopher Hatton Academy in Wellingborough, a group of students in years eight, nine and 10 looked at subsistence fishing with a view to designing a cheap boat. However, they found that fishing boat designs vary enormously according to local conditions. Their interest transferred to methods of powering such boats. They were curious about the ‘scaffold pole’…

Readers’ cruising destinations, near and far We pay for your published cruising stories and harbour updates. Email pbo@timeinc.com or write to the address at the top of page 5 At last we were off to the Isles of Scilly. It had been my dream destination since before owning a boat, and I had read at least four separate pilots and guides avidly in expectation. This summer, we were going to do it. We set off in early May for a leisurely cruise along the South Coast of England and arrived in Falmouth on 6 June to await a weather window. Despite our research, I had much trepidation. The pilots talk about low-lying rocks hidden in the Atlantic swell and the ‘frisson of excitement’ that surround the isles when the weather…

What are the biggest sailing events and highest accolades that a yacht design office can win? Going back into history and still fought over today, perhaps yachting’s oldest and most illustrious trophy is the highprofile (and high-cost) America’s Cup. Then later during the 20th century, the Admiral’s Cup – competed for in UK waters by three-boat teams from all over the world – dominated offshore cruiser-racing for many decades and had a massive influence on yacht design. More recently, the famous One Ton Cup launched international level rating competition onto the scene in 1965 – going on to spawn several smaller ‘ton cup classes.’ These IOR yachts led to the evolution of today’s wider, lighter and faster cruisers – and nowadays, yacht designers vie to win the exotic and mega-priced…

I boarded my wooden 16ft miniature gaff cutter Shoal Waters three hours before high tide at her mud mooring in Goldhanger Creek. There was no wind to speak of, but I had a couple of jobs to do before setting off – and earlier in the day I’d heard a promising forecast of Force 3 to 4 south-easterly winds to come during the next couple of days. Most people in my area on swinging or drying moorings use a tender dinghy to reach their cruiser, but in certain cases on a drying estuary this is an unnecessary luxury which I avoid by arriving with plenty of time to walk out over the soft mud. The incoming flood reaches her approximately three hours before HW and, if I’m late and she’s…

At PBO, we like to look at boats that are different – the quirky, idiosyncratic, innovative and characterful; boats that appeal to sailors who do things their own way and don’t care what the rest of the world thinks. At the same time, we can’t ignore boats designed for the broader market. After all, there’s a reason why the Beneteaus, Jeanneaus, Bavarias, Dufours and Hanses of this world have become so popular. Their dominance is plain to see when you walk down the pontoons or along the aisles at any major boat European show. To a newcomer, one broadsterned modern yacht with chines and twin wheels often looks much like the next. Telling t’other from which can be a challenge and, as I found at the Southampton Boat Show recently,…

Looking for new cruising grounds for Reservation’s summer cruise, I found the answer on my bookshelves. Green and Silver by LTC Rolt had been there since I was a teenager, and the book related a cruise through Ireland’s canals in a converted lifeboat in 1949, when petrol was still rationed. I sent for the guidebooks for the Grand Canal and River Barrow from Waterways Ireland, and found that navigation of these would be possible with Reservation’s shallow draught. My plan was to go up the River Barrow to where it joined the Grand Canal and out at the Shannon on the west coast. The diagrams in the books suggested that the locks were self-operated, but I decided to confront this obstacle when I reached the waterways. For many years I…

You can tell an unloved boat by the state of her bilges. There are many products available to clean an oily, smelly bilge. However, there are environmental consequences to consider – you can’t just pump oil overboard, even oil that’s emulsified by a bilge cleaner, so you need to make every effort to capture the oily stuff and dispose of it in a waste oil bin if you can. One solution is to use a wet vac to suck out of the bilges and contain the waste. Once this is done and the oil is gone you can have another go at cleaning out the bilges and removing any smelly residue. We looked at eight options, from washing-up liquid to purpose-made chemicals, examining how quickly they broke down the oil,…

The phone rang. ‘I’m in Hong Kong and just got myself a job here. You couldn’t drop my boat back to the marina, could you?’ ‘Just dropping’ was a 110NM delivery trip, eastwards along the south coast of Turkey from Fethiye to Finike Marina, while ‘my boat’ was an ex-charter AWB (average white boat) which our friend had bought in a rash moment a year previously before being encouraged back to work. A couple of weeks later we swapped our own boat for the AWB, which had sat on her mooring for three months. A check-over confirmed that all the important things worked. The forecast wind was Force 2 increasing to Force 3 from the west, then Force 4 from the south-west. Absolutely perfect! Motoring round out of Fethiye and…

Send us your local news stories. Email PBO news editor Laura Hodgetts at newspbo@timeinc.com, tel: 01202 440825, or write to the address on page 5 SOUTH COWES DREDGING Subject to securing funding, work is set to begin in January 2017 on the Shrape breakwater extension and Small Boat Channel improvement. Following agreement on the optimised Outer Harbour Project design layout, Cowes Harbour Commission (CHC) intends to dredge the new Eastern Channel/Small Boat Channel to a minimum of 2.25m. Plans include additional harbour dredge areas to improve the safety of navigation along the eastern perimeter of the Inner Fairway and the removal of the shoal off No1 buoy, and to increase the depth of the mooring basin inside the Cowes Breakwater. CHC is currently in negotiations with the Homes and Communities…

We left you last month with a keel set up with stem and sternpost – and not much in between. This month, we’ve made what looks like excellent progress – leaving us with something relatively boat-shaped. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. How did we get to that point? A month of sawing, sanding, planing, chiselling and fettling – and things are looking good. However, we deviated slightly from the (admittedly sparse) instructions. These suggest installing each frame as it is cut out, slotting everything together as you go. However, as we dry-fitted each piece the Secret became more and more rigid, each piece taking out some of the uncertainty that could lead to misalignment. So, with a little trepidation, we decided to dry-fit the whole kit, align it and…

AIS has been around for over a decade now, and has found a loyal following on boats small and large. While initially high costs meant most leisure boats went for receive-only AIS units, have a look at a display on a busy day and you’ll see that as transponders have come down in price, more and more leisure boats have installed them. However, while AIS is a useful tool for sailing among ships and other vessels, it’s not quite the panacea that some believe it to be. Myths and untruths abound – but how useful is it for small boats, and should you spend your hard-earned cash on a receiver, transponder or something else entirely? How it works Most sailors will know by now that AIS is split into two…

In the last issue, I described how the boat depicted here being built has come back home after many years. Fortunately it was very well cared for by the previous owner, and is still so familiar it feels as though it has never left. That’s probably because that process of spending time engaged in an ongoing practical project like this becomes absorbing in a way that’s quite unique. The techniques I used to build her back then remain among the most accessible ways for the home-builder to get afloat. She is built of marine plywood using clinker epoxy construction: this means that the planks overlap along their length like in a clinker boat, but instead of using fastenings (rivets) the planks are held together by fillets of two-part epoxy glue.…

Email your projects and tips to pbo@timeinc.com or write to us at the address at the top of page 5. We pay at least £30 for each one published Some like it hot! Arne Kverneland devises an efficient way to heat his boat’s cabin In PBO September 2016, I read with interest editor David Pugh’s story about installing a heater in his co-owned Contessa 26, and the physical contortions involved in the process. Now, it’s not for everyone to have a Houdini in the family, and if access to battery power is limited, one has to make do with a simpler solution. Back in 2008 I had an Alo 28, a three-ton sailboat. It was fitted with a Taylor paraffin heater, and for the winter I added a Fuji heater.…