toerag

Thought the forum would find this interesting:- https://guernseypress.com/news/2020/06/18/alderney-lays-down-law-for-charter-boats/ Private boats will invariably have similar restrictions, check https://www.visitalderney.com/travel/sail-to-alderney/ for details. Certainly anyone coming ashore needs to self-isolate for 14 days at present - this applies to all the islands in the Bailiwick of Guernsey. The Bailiwick is coming out of lockdown ahead of the UK as the virus is under control here (no new cases for 48 days), with all restrictions apart from the travel one above being removed as from Saturday.

What are they doing with the Ice Prince?

Well Alfresco, Just Perfick and Joint Venture made it across and were fishing yesterday 'cos I either heard them talking on the radio, or saw them (Tomo, you don't half 'park' too close to other boats on the drift considering how big the bank is, but your boat looks great!). I would have said hello to more of you but hadn't been in here for ages and didn't know you were coming over It was only when I recognised Alfresco that I clicked! ABM and I had 15 turbot and brill between us, how did you guys do?

The exhaust bellows on my duoprop drive actually have a small hole in them designed to let the water out. Ask your friendly volvo engineer, he should know.

quick questions/points - Do you have a trim gauge for the leg? The windows look like the ones on my MI - if they don't sit particularly level under way then yuo'll get water coming in through the drain slots in the outside if you're taking lots of water over the bow. Mine have the sliding part at the rear, I think newer ones have the sliding bit towards the bow. Fuel pre-filter - commercial coding won't allow the glass bowl. Looking good though!

Plastimo no longer make the plastic tube reflectors you'll be pleased to know. I recently bought a traditional diamond-shaped reflector as I need one for Guernsey commercial regs, it's currently sat in the cabin awaiting mounting - I just have to work out how to fix it above my radar which is sat on top of the arch.

Hmm, even louder than a Vulcan?

I have Micron Optima on mine - I chose an eroding antifoul as I don't like the idea of paint buildup. It's waterbased which makes it dead easy to apply and clean up afterwards. It is incredibly soft (like kiddie's poster paint), you can literally 'sand it down' with a sponge!! It does work very well on the under-hull surfaces if you use the boat regularly, but you need at least 4 coats to start with. It is not the right thing to use on the transom or waterline though, as these areas need scrubbing (no water movement to get rid of the weed) and all you do is scrub it off. If I were starting from scratch I'd give the whole hull a couple of coats of Gelshield, then a couple of coats of a hard antifoul compatible with optima, then put optima on top afterwards. A 2.5l tin gives enough coats for a year's use for me - it needs to be completely dry before immersion though, as will all coatings, read the tin! I change colour every year so I can see where it's worn off. This is a pic of mine when it came out in summer last year - you can see mullet feeding scrapes on the transom, and how the underside of the hull is weed free compared to the waterline 'beard'.

Did you find the trilux difficult to get a decent thickness on? I've used it to paint my props, and I found subsequent coats softened the ones below so it was impossible to build up any thickness.

Ahoy - what rod and braid (make and BS) are you using?

I assume it's a KAB seat? Make sure you keep all the gubbins inside the bellows greased up - I don't have the bellows on mine and it's well rusted down there. I also have mine set on the stiffest setting and even then it still bottoms out, so I tend to drive stood up but leaning on the seat.

Re: indicators - essential if you need to use the tabs a lot. I normally leave mine fully up and trim with the leg or by shifting weight around.

18kg a day = 18 litres of water - 3.5l reservoir - you're going to have to top it up every few hours. Fine if you have enough freezer space to keep ice, in which case you can run it every evening for a week or so to build up a stock of ice for the weekend. 18kg isn't much unless you don't catch much fish - a fishbox probably holds 30kg of ice. By the way, flake ice is better than cubes as it's not lumpy and doesn't bruise the fish. - if you can crush the cubes you'll be better off.

Why moor stern to? so you don't hear the waves slapping under the V berth? I would have thought mooring 'stern to' with a sterndrive likemost small boats was asking for trouble.

Psst, wanna buy some off me? I'm going tomorrow.

To answer various questions:- Dragging your anchor backwards instead of a weight is fine - but if you tie it on backwards with cable ties they will wear out and it will swing round and you'll find yourself anchored when you don't want to be!! Don't ask me how I know that... By the way, there is a snag on the eastern side of the schole, so don't drag around that way if you can help it. I might try to get the numbers for it off my plotter tomorrow. Mackerel - as Mark said, you shouldn't have a problem finding enough - the shoals were quite patchy on the Schole on saturday, but once you found them you'd pick up 4 or more at a time. Plenty of Launce too, although on the tides this weekend you'll probably need slack to catch in quantity. The tides really are too big to permit turbot dragging over peak flow, even dragging a weight, so you may as well switch to bassing over peak flow and back to flats as the tide slackens. Overfalls on the main lips of the banks can render them unfishable so you might have to find one of the 'banklets' to fish instead. Those hoping for turbot could be disappointed - numbers of fish are down on the previous 3 or 4 years. My theory is that the small <5lb fish all got hammered by the beamers in deeper water in the unregulated 3-12 mile zone last winter, so all we're seeing is the bigger fish, which are in the same numbers as usual - not many! Guernsey boats have had fish of 17 & 26lb in the past couple of weeks though, so there are the odd busters out there. It's a bit early for brill really. Water clarity had been improving, but the may bloom's started, and this week's building tides and today's stiff breeze will probably stir all the silt off the bottom again. You can get the latest CI shipping forecast by calling 0900 669 0022 which is premium rate,

Adam, before you go shopping do more research - If you think you may eventually get a fishing license or use it for charter (COP) then you may have more stringent regs to deal with in terms of positioning eg. height above sea level. Over here the fishing vessel regs have just become more stringent for an under 7 or 8m vessel. IMO you are always best to fit a boat out 'to COP requirements' or at least make it easy to do in the future. As lights invariably involve holes in the cabin it's worth only doing it once!

OK, so I eventually had to get my ally duoprops repainted after 3 years use a couple of years ago. I wirebrushed them back to bare metal, etch-primed them and used Trilux as per international paint's instructions - which didn't work very well at all, lasted only a season. I then had a run in with an uncharted rock off Alderney necessitating a repair to the ends of the blades, and the prop repair man reckoned you had to acid-dip them and epoxy prime them straight away or the ally oxidises before you have a chance to paint them - which I believe is true, so I got him to do that and triluxed them myself - result - even worse than the time before! It seems that trilux is rubbish at multiple coats as each successive coat dissolves the one below preventing a decent build up of thickness, and consequently the edges of the blades get chipped and start to corrode, with the corrosion lifting the paint easily. So this time I'm going for the 'acid-dip and epoxy prime' route again, but am thinking of putting a couple of coats of 'normal' epoxy paint over the top before antifouling to give a tough thickness to resist chipping and the cavitation corrosion I get. Does anybody have any experience or recommendations? I have a spare set of props, so I can pretty much paint a set at my leisure, but I don't really want to have to go through the process every year! I can soon see me getting stainless ones if that's the case.

For what it's worth I have a fuel prefilter/separator for my AD31P of unknown make and type - but I do know that the drain on the bottom is plastic and I'm so scared that it'll snap off in my hand I've never opened it. My well-respected mechanic said he's of the same opinion when I asked him, he says the best thing to do is carry a spare and change the whole filter if I have trouble, which I haven't done yet (touch wood). I think the metal bowl thing is a reliability thing - they're less likely to get broken and leak fuel everywhere than a glass one.

Over here we have 2 grades of heating oil - '28 second' which is diesel, and '35 second' which is kerosene. My mate has 2 tanks in his garden which 4 of us use as a syndicate for our boats. There's no worries about measurement as we all use 25litre cans or drums to transport it to the boats. Makes your arms ache carrying 100l of fuel 100m down a pontoon though!

Adam - what were your other shortlisted vessels out of interest? I think she'll work really well with the D3 190. Are Aquafish hulls moulded to 'seafish' or COP standards?

Coddy's idea is great, but I wouldn't trust screws to hold a pedestal down - there's a lot of leverage created when you grab it to stop yourself falling over. Take Coddys idea of a disc, but put countersunk bolts and washers up through it to bolt the pedestal onto before glassing it down. I dunno how you stop the bolts from turning without getting to the heads though.

hmm, you're brave!! With regard to weather, invariably it's a force higher in Alderney than anywhere else in the channel, and big tides only ever make it worse. Tackleshop Mark does have a dinghy, but it's a nightmare to row, and the paint will come off it and get all over your hull if your fendering's not brilliant, believe me, I know, LOL! He'd let you use though I reckon.

It's not built properly - I've had holes in the hull TWICE where it's flexed inwards and the sprayrails have suffered compression failure. It's been cured by glassing longitudinal ribs inside the cabin after repairing the holes. Original MI's and Souters won't have this problem so you'll be OK.

I use micron optima on my marina-moored MI and it works very well. Being a soft AF it does wear away over the course of the season, but as long as there's 4 coat's worth on the hull at the start there's no problems. The waterlines in the sun do suffer from green hair weed growth, which scrubs of easily with a brush or sponge, but the AF is so soft you can easily scrub it all away. I've tried putting Trilux on the area to combat this this season. I know it's expensive, but the big advantage is that it's water soluble, so there's no nasty fumes and cleanup is a doddle. There is also no fouling other than a bit of slime as long as the 4 coats rule is kept up, and it doesn't build up in layers that start flaking off either. Any 'high spots' can be 'sanded away' using a damp sponge! I change the colour each season so I know where it's worn off. I reckon it takes an hour to do a coat by the way, and I normally use a whole