motorb

You should get in touch with the weiti boat club - that smaller craft might fit an empty spot in the river and such shallow draft would be able to get in and out on almost any tide.

I cannot understand how paddleboarders are exempt but our ship to shore tenders arent What even qualifies a paddleboard over a RIB? Do I just pull the air floor out of my inflatable? Air mattress and an oar?

Translation: this idea is still unproven and not ready to provide any service. Its not impossible, but has significant challenges due to being a passive device carried along on the stratospheric winds. As helpful as the Ai summaries sound, the robot is trained to maximise your usage by being be helpful rather than critical.

Fwiw, I talked to an owner of one of those 40-odd foot euro models and he said the self tacking jib was very much for cruising, not racing.

Or they would patent it and make it part of their marketing strategy

It's pretty intelligent when you think about it.... ...intelligently maximizing profits for the antifouling companies.

Haha mate I was thinking the same thing! Just spent hours scraping barnacles off my hull plus about 3 kg of mussels off a mooring line

These Weiti barnacles are insane! Seems to be a lot of spawn in the water there and up around Kawau. We never had anything like this level of fouling at westhaven, but thats different water in a different location ( and maybe all the road runoff plus 40 odd years of old school antifoul contamination has something to do with it...) Oddly enough, closing the second entrance actually helped reduce fouling for us while we were there. Maybe it's the silt passing through on the tides that feeds the barnacles?

Have you seen what copper costs these days? You bet they are using exactly as little as possible to compete in the market. The reality is that the "good" stuff is all eventually banned, as by being toxic enough to deter growth it's also going to be problematic when concentrated in a marina "environment" (and probably not great for the humans applying/maintaining it either.) I suspect the way forward from here is indeed homebrew mixes based on nothing more than old wives tales and anecdotes, or some ultra expensive engineered coating like copper coat.

Yes. A few years back i had a tin of blue that was actually green, and it was the best antifoul Ive ever used. Altex refunded me, and once in the water, the paint below the waterline went pale blue after a few months. A little birdie told me that was a faulty manufacturing batch with faaaar too much copper in it, which is what made it green. So it wouldnt surprise me if sea green 5 plus is a superior product, as I think ive already sampled a trial batch!

So we can't move to a handstand, but we must get it cleaned, and must do it on dry land in a facility like a handstand. And those pontoons are absolutely fine farming fan worm because they don't move, but that boat that's heavily fouled precisely because it hasn't moved in years isn't fine, and needs to be moved.....

Plenty of poles available in Westhaven.... ... but unofficially not taking bookings so they can use "lack of demand" to justify redevelopment.

Does it duct the heat outside?

Head down this week and see which areas have sufficient parking..... being close to the gate is always nice, but not much use if you're parked at the other end of the marina!

Forecast peak wind is something like 150kts!

Racing is just the canary in the coal mine. Young people can barely afford to keep a roof over our heads, let alone have kids or maintain a sailboat. A lot of old boats are going to be scrapped in the coming decades.

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.)