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Ex Machina

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Posts posted by Ex Machina

    Where are the youth?

    in MarineTalk

    Posted

    If you look at the economic impact of training for Olympic classes it just costs loads for very little return to the taxpayer or yachting in general with the exception of the America’s cup when we win it .

     

    Amateur sailors more often than not end up in the marine industry or crewing on superyachts etc heaps of them become professional sailors too . They also support the marine industry buying kit for boats and the plethora of other stuff that goes with owning or sailing a boat .

     

    Bang for buck seems much bigger to me in supporting the lower echelon , gifted kids will always trickle up to high performance or Olympic classes .

     

    Maybe a starting point could be inter-club communication regarding potential classes that could be suitable for local regattas which seems to be happening up here in the north with bics popping up around the clubs

    Where are the youth?

    in MarineTalk

    Posted

    It’s a tough one but having a blended family of 6 kids four of them teenagers and two of them in their early twenties my opinion is that devices and internet have killed off that desire for physical activities that you expect from kids .

     

    None of my teenage kids have the self motivation to go to the beach which is across the road let alone go yachting or even ride a bloody bike !. But on the bright side my two adult kids are really getting interested again in sailing . After helping me bring the boat back from the coastal my daughter promptly signed up as crew for the Route 66 and is trying to talk me into doing Bay week . The two older kids have grown out of watching stupid sh*t on YouTube and playing mind numbing games on their phones . So I guess you just have to introduce kids to sailing and try your best to engage them and hope that some of them will come back to it .

     

    We have a pretty good number of youth sailors at our club but they seldom come out on the bigger boats , dunno why that is

    • Upvote 3

    Barriers to Participation / Crewing

    in MarineTalk

    Posted

    It was interesting to note that there were 80 odd boats in coastal this year that were new to the race or hadn't done the race for many years .

     

    Last year the total number of boats participating was very similar 150ish ? What happened with the 80 odd boats from last year that didn't participate this year ? Sure some would not have been able to make it due to other commitments but that's a very large drop in return participants

    Coastal Classic

    in RaceTalk

    Posted

    Did a search of this forum and I misinterpreted a post from years back .

     

    "Blue dude disappeared over the horizon early one morning with a mad Frenchman on the stick" but it did make it to noumea apparently his crew got off at barrier !

    Coastal Classic

    in RaceTalk

    Posted

    A sad end  :cry:

    I vaguely remember reading somewhere maybe even on these forums that blue dude was lost on the delivery to noumea ?

     

    Something along the lines of zero preparation for the trip and an inexperienced solo skipper combined with bad weather ?

     

    It was a cool boat and very quick i think it did the coastal in Under 11 hours sometime in the late 90s ?

     

    I went onboard once after a race for festivities you had to sit in the bilge there was nothing in there except for a battery box , stereo and vhf , completely stripped out and had ring frames

    Noelex 22 mast base measurement

    in TechTalk

    Posted

    Ok I measured 4 boats

     

    Two of them were 2300mm

     

    And two were 2330mm

     

    Measured from front of aluminium tabernacle to bow proper , not to end of bow roller .

     

    All were factory boats , one very old with the odd looking deck that slopes straight up from the bow that boat and the newest boat were 2330 , the other two that looked exactly the same were 2300.

    phone antenna

    in TechTalk

    Posted

    Was it Huawei ? I've got one at home and a relative has one on his boat . Both spark and Vodafone run them , modem is free (kind of) they are sold as wireless packages the packages are a bit more than landlines . And as IT said you can plug a regular phone in to it with as landline number . The speeds are pretty good we have no problems with streaming Netflix etc and they work on 3 and 4G

    Protecting the inexperienced

    in MarineTalk

    Posted

    This story reminds me of an incredibly enthusiastic Bavarian chap that was dock crew on a boat I work on at the turn of the century . He was backpacking round NZ at the time and was employed helping us commission the boat for its first passage which was up to Papeete .

     

    Boat got finished , we buggered off and left a sad Bavarian bloke on the dock . About halfway through that winter he shows up in Papeete in an old lidgard 1/4 tonner with a mate . Took them almost a month to make the passage from Auckland , the engine crapped out 2 weeks in they spent the last week beating into NE trades but somehow made it with only dinghy sailing experience and a waitemata shakedown cruise plus a ton of enthusiasm .

     

    Not condoning setting off ill prepared but it's amazing what some people do with some very basic equipment and some very small and unusual vessels .

    Boat show aftermath

    in MarineTalk

    Posted

    I really like the melges 32 and flying tiger concept of lifting keel on a trailer . Really competitive boats for the Everyman slot in NZ fleets and you could land one here for under 100k . If you bought the F10 in Aussie currently for sale for 38k it would be well under 100k . Wouldn't work for everyone but I'm spoilt with an excellent cheap facilty for parking trailer yachts at our club .

     

    As for trailer tinnies and some glass boats it seems to be a rite of passage for tradies to get a wopping great tinnie and one hell of a tow wagon , most of those boat / wagon combos would be worth 200k and there's hundreds of them up here in northland . it's definitely a growth industry right now .

    Perspex Windows

    in TechTalk

    Posted

    Did mine last year and Mulford did em too .

     

    My default window fitting subconscious left over from the 90s led me to fitting them with the sika system .

     

    Cost more than the Windows themselves . Look for a one pot system , sika requires a whole bunch of activators and primers and UV friggin blockers. plus it stinks the boat out for about 2 months

     

    But it does work just wish I'd done a bit more research into alternatives

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