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Kevin McCready

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Everything posted by Kevin McCready

  1. Matt, NZ Territoy covers South Pole to up near Tonga. It's horses for courses. RCC decides, depending on location of epirb, who to contact. They work as a team so while one phones the EPIRB owner's registered contacts, another team member will be liasing with police on a no surprises basis and with Maritime Radio and or coastguard. But RCC will coordinate the response. In the Hauraki Gulf for example RCC would also contact Maritime Radio and helicopter team (they might take a while to become airborne but they have 406 trackers on board). So I'm inclined to trust, especially given the Chann
  2. Maritime NZ website awaiting update currently says: "RCCNZ usually receives alerts from distress beacons within minutes. However, depending on the type of beacon you're carrying, it can take two hours or longer for satellites to pinpoint your location." http://www.maritimenz.govt.nz/Recreational-Boating/Communications-equipment/EPIRBs.asp#Why_is_the_response_not_always_immediate This advice is very general worst case scenario and applies to land and sea. The situation on sea is better because signals are picked up easier (no terrain and vegetation problems). Maritime NZ are wo
  3. I use dual or tri-watch depending on VHF in use and it's always on unless I need sleep. I have a small EPIRB folded into my life-jacket. I trust that if I go overboard my GPS position would be known within minutes?? I also use paper charts for everywhere I go. It's a skill we should all have and maintain.
  4. Thanks Matt How would this be better than the app on Android
  5. I don't have enough info to make a call on whether the boat was ok or what condition the crew may have been in or how good tie downs were inside for floorboards, equipment and crew and therefore risk of injury. Or whether they were pumping water etc etc. I did think it was getting along at quite a clip even with the drougue, but as long as the drouge prevented broach and roll, good! Problem could be cross seas later causing broach and roll from a different direction and I don't know what was forecast.
  6. Hi matt do you have a link to what you have. By the way the crew website for mobile does not have a button to follow a thread
  7. Oops. Big apologies to Matt. Should have said Ken.
  8. We're all idiots and make mistakes. So sorry Matt, can't agree on this one. The science of urban design is crystal clear on this one. And if it's not a matter of science then I vote for the amenity argument. It's nice to be in CBDs without cars. Have you tried the revamped New York lately?
  9. As one commenter said so eloquently: "Pity the harbour rescue were not too late so he drowned, thus letting Darwinian selection do its job properly." For context, Bob said in his silly rant that the speed limit in the CBD should be 80 k and let natural selection operate. FFS.
  10. from wikipedia: if the load is to be hauled against gravity, then there is a benefit to reeving the block and tackle to disadvantage, because in this case the weight of the individual can offset the weight of the load. On the other hand, if the load is to be hauled parallel to the ground, there is a benefit to reeving the block and tackle to advantage, because the pulling force is in the direction of the load movement allowing the individual to manage obstacles.
  11. Having had a career back and forth to China, yes it is a terrible job. I keep away these days because of the pollution, OHS and food safety issues. One site I was on had people packing powered asbestos into brake block moulds with their bare hands outside in the wind! I left within 20 seconds. The model was the same sort of mum, dad and the kids backyard operation that got the Japanese car industry started all those years ago. The same operation used the outsourcing model to supply a huge part of the world's grinding disks. These days I sit comfortably at home or on the boat and do tra
  12. I spoke to Sven Yvind a few days ago. He wanted EUR200 to make me one. Maybe that's a fair price. I don't know. Can any of you smart chaps make me one for half that price or less? I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to help with any technical details. Who knows, you could make hundreds and go into a new line of business. http://www.yrvind.com/present_project/?p=1225 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ayrvind.com+MINISEXTANT&gws_rd=ssl
  13. Let's hope so. When I saw the first few episodes of Whale Wars (the HBO? doco on them) I was actually VERY surprised they hadn't killed any of their own crew!!! Check out the launching under way of their rib. Don't get me wrong, they are doing a great job. But Whale Wars showed Watson as a liar and manipulator. First mate Peter Brown wouldn't know one end of a rope from another. Second mate Peter Hammarstedt was a creepy acolyte of Watson who knew how to play to Watson's god complex. The management style was like nothing I'd ever seen. A suggestion, not an order, was made by Watson fr
  14. Having read the last Professional Skipper on the navy/wet bus ticket accusation, I'm siding with the Navy. Rule of Law and Law of the Sea is fundamental to a small nation like NZ. Hey Matt, is there an option to automatically subscribe to a post I've posted on. It wastes time having to click on 'more reply options'.
  15. Funny you should mention it Matt because I have just come out of a conference which was quickly resolved AFTER the video footage was presented. Funny how the story changed! So now I want compulsory dashcams in all vehicles on the roads too. Yes a few will still be sociopaths in boats or on the roads despite licensing or dashcams or whatever. But on our roads I'd hazard a guess that our death toll would take another dive (after it did with compulsory seat belts and after it did with random breath testing) if we had compulsory dashcams - and they are so cheap these days. Re bureacratic costs for
  16. These will be on our waters MUCH quciker than you think. Dopey buggers with more money than sailing experience or manners will want to have them because their penises are too small. I'll want one too, the boat that is. But the REAL take home message is that it's Time for Compulsory Boat Licences (TCBL). For example I would LOVE to have filmed the rich arsehole in the big fancy boat who tried to bully me into giving way in Man O'War Bay 1835 hrs last Saturday night. We were both under motor his sails furled and my main up coming into the anchorage. I stood on and he came within metres b
  17. I met a guy who cruised for 10 years with his wife on a Cav32. I met another guy who's sailed to Fiji and back in a modern open-transom design! I still incline to the solid older design. I would steer well clear of multi-hulls for bad weather. You flip them and call for help.
  18. Nice. What would be nicer is if the Government mandated some LED standards like other civilised countries. At the moment you never know what you're getting.
  19. Putting my economist hat on, gotta say that the trickle down trick of "so and so many thousand jobs created" is as old as the hills and usually relies on some very dodgy stats. So I'm very wary of the claim by Rehabilited (whoever he or she is) that POA "adds more than 187,000 jobs to the Auckland economy." I also find it the mark of a crude analysis, not to put too fine a point on it, that Rehab dismisses any alternative to his/her views as communist (grey boiler suits from memory). I think Rehab loses on a reverse technicality of Godwin's Law. But let's not forget the most telling argume
  20. Thanks for the Manapouri flashback! Here's the old John Hanlon song, Damn the Dam. ('cept is was power for Comalco, not the people, but why quibble with the lyrics at so late a date).
  21. I decided I wanted what I thought would be a solid safe boat capable of withstanding a storm if I ever got into one. I now know that the Easterly 30 would need a bit more work and some mods to bring it up to Cat 1 and bring it up to where I'd be happy - but that's another story. For around the Gulf and for single day dashes along the coast I'd probably go for another type of boat now, more modern. Anyway, I looked pretty seriously for a year or more and made serious offers on three other boats, but we couldn't agree on a price. Then on the Easterly we came to a price pretty quickly. I'
  22. Same as in all markets - you have to know the sale prices of similar goods. Problem in boatie world is cultural reluctance to say what you paid or sold a boat for - reminds me of arab horse traders doing finger negotiations under a blanket. I don't have such reluctance; so for the record I bought an Easterly 30 a few months ago - there were about four or five on the market in NZ at the time at an average asking price of $37k. I got mine for $20. It's a damn good boat and I want to record my thanks to a realistic and helpful vendor if he reads this. He looked after it beautifully for many y
  23. Not Penny Whiting, Penny Hulse, deputy mayor. She was chairing the meeting in the video
  24. I'll be there at the demo on Sunday! These arseholes did this in secret and made the decision BEFORE the final report on the port's future is released and discussed. Same bunch of arseholes run a system to let an "independent" Duty Commissioner decide in secret that 300 year old kauri tree and ancient rimu (including on the public road reserve) could be cut down after describing it as "vegetation". I was at sea for 8 days and missed that bit of fun but caught up with the brilliant reporting of Kane Glass - (watch the tame bureaucrat forced to admit that a "threshold" is his personal "j
  25. FWIW I inherited old extinguishers and replaced them. I tested an old rusty one with the dial stuck by giving the shower stall at home a squirt - the extinguisher worked fine but the stink and tiny particles and the clean up!!! Never again. So don't let anyone convince you that fire extinguishers contain nothing more than just harmless compressed CO2 or sodium bicarbonate. And also, FWIW, I am told that the Government has now forced the NZ Fire Service (NZFS) to cease doing free community training sessions. In the old days you could ring the local fire station and make a time to take your
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