motorb

https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/06/24/poor-seamanship-lack-of-proper-charts-led-to-hauraki-gulf-grounding/

This long weekend is looking mint for sailing.

I doubt the distinction was made by those making the rules, even if the issue at hand is indeed those 20kts boats with open props in the water. Of course if a guy doing 20 kts can hit a relatively stationary ferry hard enough to sink it and kill someone, the whales and dolphins have no chance of being spotted regardless of these misguided (but well intentioned) rules Even my 25ft keeler is apparently invisible to some of those boaties, so I don't see how the typical riviera skipper will locate and track a pod of dolphins that are cruising along below the surface. I've s

Can't park there, mate.

Nothing under 15 meters!? Well I'm not entirely surprised.

Maybe we should all just go back to cladding our hulls in copper plates?

Welding won't be too expensive, so I guess it's probably worth a shot if you can't find available replacement parts. At the very least you will get a few years out of it until being forced into replacement. Just keep in mind that welding will remove any protective anodizing in that area. I would wonder if a wheel place might not be as capable as a good engineering shop, but that will vary wildly between wheel shops and engineers/welders anyway.

Honestly, I'm waiting a few more years for the new sodium-ion battery tech to come into the mainstream. It's got all the benefits of lithium with none of the fire hazard, at only a slight weight penalty. It's already on the market so won't take long for victron etc to catch up. In the meantime, I'll stick with my AGM lead acid. Saving 20-30kg isn't going to make much difference for me (and the weight is low down anyway). OK, that wasn't helpful.... stainless is fine for a battery box assuming there's no chafing or shorting, but where is all the heat and gas going to go if it

That's a very shortsighted view of the situation, and as someone too young to experience these stories of a past healthy hauraki in the 70s/80s, and myself wanting things to be better for my own future kids and grandkids, I find that attitude to be a pretty appalling. (That's the polite version.)

My "paper" charts seem to show it....

If it was going to be good news they would have told us by now. Expect the worst; Auckland Council has no interest in "subsidising" auckland boaties and demands the maximum financial return. Just be thankful they haven't figured out how to sell it to a property developer.... yet.

Private would take one short sighted set of management to run a stock to extinction before moving onto the next species. Plenty of existing examples of this to know it wouldn't work.

Yeah stuff like that is why I don't take many of these standards too seriously. There are risks associated with lead acid, (namely wet/flooded cells that can produce hydrogen gas), but having them compartmentalised is neither necessary nor standard practice. Edit: The omission of that hazard is actually pretty telling....

Great Barrier is part of Auckland. The question should be why Waiheke and Rakino gets exemption from the rules....

Read that recent article, and I still can't fathom how it costs eighty thousand dollars to dispose of a boat.