Steve S

Hi James, welcome Yes it would be but you need to be aware of the sea conditions, in general you should be ok up to a F2-F3. Assuming you are fairly inexperienced being on a boat at sea there are are lots of factors to take into account, wind direction, swell size, tide. Then there's the safety side of things, I'm sure Mal will be able to advise on that.

Clamps over the pipes, great idea, thanks. The motor is defo knackered, the ACU puts up a drive voltage across the motor to make a course connection but the motor does not always respond by powering up to effect the steering change. It might be brushes inside the motor but they are not changeable.

The auto pilot pump on Tigerfish has worn out (auto pilot errors and pump drops out) I've bought a replacement but I'm not sure how best to drain down the hydraulic fluid to a level where I can change the pump without lots of fluid running out the pipes as I replace them. I would like to do the job with the boat still in the water. Boat spec: Twin Volvo D4s with outdrives, cabin and flybridge helm, hydraulic steering. Auto pilot pump fitted in the engine bay. Any advice will be most welcome.

I think it has a lot going for the rescue services, relaying the latitude and longitude is much more error prone and hard for many folks to understand. I think it's usable for fishing marks too, very likely better than passing over the coordinates which has a number of different formats. I hope it does get adopted more widely.

I do take some to eat Jim, we just have enough fish at home at the moment so back it went. The livebait tank that came with the boat is great (aside from eel grass blocking) it allows a couple of big bass to stay alive so decisions about which ones to keep can be made late in the day which saves catch a 3 pounder keep or return dilemma.

I decided to stick inshore for the bass comp; mackerel and scad were few and far between and mostly the ones caught were too big for bait, a herring did also show up, first of the year for me. The biggest of the scad weighed exactly a 1lb. It took well over 2 hours before there were a few decent baits in the live well. When I finally started for bass they were having it but there was a lot of weed around which made it frustrating and I soon ran out of decent bait, not helped by a few dying when the live well filter got blocked with eel grass, that's the second week running that's happened, grrr. Tried a live pollock of probably just under a 1lb and had a couple of takes on that from bass with eyes bigger than their belly, I saw them but they dropped off before I could net them. The biggest of the bass went 6lb 5oz weighted back at the marina for accuracy, I returned it. Others were mostly around 4lb with a couple at 2lb or so taken while fishing for bait.

Tigerfish: Steve and Diane (not fishing) - Saturday

Great stuff, bit of a heart stopping moment there Charlie! For future reference when you next in that lucky position I've found (Florida and Kenya) 'mostly' big sharks do long runs but then will turn back or are prepared to come back to you, so next time maybe let it run till you are almost out of line in the hope it will do so. Another thing on these long runs the drag force gets higher and higher as the diameter of the reel spooled with line reduces, it can make a massive difference so you can need to back off the drag, easy to say but in the heat of the moment easy to forget!

For Alun and I on Tigerfish, the 48 hour comp transmuted to just the Saturday. We had a good day out. First objective find some mackerel, happily we soon saw some terns diving so out with the feathers. We had a mad time catching mackerel of all sizes, out numbered by the bass, some over 2lb, they were coming in thick and fast, great fun 3 at once at times. They were feeding on herring fry. With enough mackerel in the live well we set off for some bigger bass. A bigger one showed up first drift, we had 10 or so of good size mostly between 4 and 6lb. The best went 7lb 9oz. After a fairly early return we gave the boat a good clean down then off to the Mayflower for a pint.

Tigerfish is not visiting Cherbourg now either, the Sunday forecast doesn't look much fun [emoji852]. Planning on going just on Saturday now.

Tigerfish will be having a go, hopefully partly in French waters. On board: Steve, Alun, Terry

I bought my boat secondhand, it already had antifoul on the legs, can't tell if there was a layer of primer between the antifoul and paint the drives come with. The bottom half on one of the legs however was replaced about 2 years ago (skeg damage due to rope entanglement). The guys at Ropewalk lightly abraded the new part and applied Trilux, there had been no problem with adhesion of the antifoul since. That's background, to answer your question, the antifoul is not being applied to bare metal where primer must be applied it is being applied to a tough paint finish. So what we are dealing with is a question of bonding. In my view if a good bond can be achieved without a primer no need to use one. The guys at Ropewalk didn't think it was needed to get a good bond, I went along with that, so far that's proven out to be fine. So in my view I don't think there is any harm in applying a primer but I'm not convinced it is actually needed to get a good bond. Lightly abrading is unfortunately needed to get a good bond, I say unfortunately because I don't like damaging in any way the quality paint job the legs come with even if just the top of it's top coat.

As with mostly everything with boats used for essentially leisure, the more you use it the less problems there are. This is certainly true for fouling, I aim if at all possible to take Tigerfish out at least once a week even if I just go for a blast round the Solent in rough weather, great fun if you have that kind of mindset... For stopping fuel consumption rising through the year aside from regular use I find the most effective thing is cleaning the props, I do this with a brush and abrasive pad while kneeling from the swim platform, generally twice a year, fairly quick if they are not too bad to start with. For the rest of the leg I've found a single good thick coat of Trilux is just enough for the way I use the boat but then again I'm not berthed in Cobbs so can't compare. Interesting that you use Interspeed Charlie, I didn't realise that is ok for aluminium.

Hope yours is not quite like this one I saw last week [emoji6]

Jerry clean them off, very lightly abrade the paint then apply a coat of trilux. I use aerosol for all the tricky bits and brush for the flat bits. Saves money on the aerosols, it's just ok for a season, just.

If you are using the NMEA 0183 then that should be ok, the impedance presented by the powered off plotter should not be so high as to stop the signals getting through. If it does cause a problem you will need a switch to select the source. If both plotters are turned on at once you likely will get corrupt coordinate messages sent to the VHF, it should not break anything, just the radio won't get good coordinates. Good luck

Mick, what are these 'GPS' units? Do you mean the MFD (multi function display) aka plotter. To get coordinate data into your VHF radio is fairly straightforward, but it depends on the make and model of the radio. Traditionally a NMEA 0183 connection is used, doing that way you need to decide the source of the coordinate data (if you have more than one) and wire it to the DSC radio. Providing 2 sources of coordinates to the radio is not useful, the radio can only handle one set of position information. If you have 2 sources and want to choose which source to supply to the radio then connect both NMEA sources to a switch on the dash and select manually that way. As a general rule only one source of GPS position information should be used at a time on a boat and that source supplied to everything.

Lymington River at sunset

Bass on!

Hi Neil, sounds quite few issues there, did you get a survey done before you handed over the money? As there is no waste tank you should not use it unless well out at sea, that can be a pain. Could be worth investigating getting one fitted. The list doesn't sound good at all, unless maybe you have just decanted your lead weights on one side....

Tigerfish is going Friday morning unless the weather changes a lot for the worse. It will either be a 3 or 4 day trip depending on how Monday's weather shapes up. We plan to fish a few wrecks on the way over. How about everybody else?

So it's looking like a go on Friday currently 😀 Any current news on the fishing out there? I know there have been a decent number of pollock and a few cod off the wrecks (well some of them)

Sawfish 15 to 16ft long, estimated weight 700lb. Caught in the Florida Keys

A pain indeed Charlie, just waiting and watching at present. If it's a no good I'll try and do something else depending on wind direction. I've got the reserve dates booked as holiday so I could do those if needed.

Neil, nice looking boat that, well done. That will extend your range a bit, Alderney should be no problem!