As we speak the Robert Charles Brown is back in Cowes at South Boats where her refit was undertaken. A decision was taken by HQ this morning that she should go back to the yard rather than Poole. A crew from the yard arrived this afternoon and took her away. A sad change from the triumphant return of yesterday! Still, we have grown used to 'Pinky' (as Mary Margaret has become known to us) and will no doubt now have the chance to add a few further shouts to her tally. No matter how nice it is to have ones own boat, surely the most important thing is to have a boat and to be able to continue to provide the service that we do. Let's not dwell on the 'what ifs' and 'might have beens'...........
5 comments:
That's bad luck....
Does this relate to the fact that the Mersey is primarily a carriage launched vessel? Or is that a red-herring.
Cromer, near where I live, have just got a Mersey as relief boat, carriage launched off the beach. Happened to see it return the other day and the recovery process - that's a mission.....
should you happen to be interested, a video of it is online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Su-Qgqi6U
Thanks for the youtube link, it's great to see how much easier it is to recover on a slipway. The 'Royal Shipwright' has also been a relief boat at Swanage. The Mersey was designed with a duel purpose role, being both suitable for carriage and slipway. The Robert Charles Brown has been on station since 1991, and has never failed it it's ability to launch down the slipway. Let's hope they sort the problem out soon. Dave C
Slipway has to be easier I guess, although at Cromer I understand that can be very weather dependent......
The keel being dead straight & dead flat is far more important on a slipway as the boat goes over a lot of rollers before getting to the sea and the weight of the boat needs to be evenly spread between them. Its not so important with a carriage as the boat pretty much floats off most of the time.
The news from Cowes is that the keel on our boat is 'hogged' (arched up) it would seem that its the back half of the keel causing the problem, its only about 4 or 5 mm but it makes all the difference. There's a lot of head scratching going on at the moment as to how it happened but more importantly how to fix it! Its not possible to just shave some metal off the keel as this would decrease the gap under the bilge keels and may cause them to bind . . a tricky one.
DT
the condition of the keel on a carriage boat is just as important as it has to run down the rollers smoothly when launching(if it was to be floated off as previously mentioned you would be in a tidy mess !) also it needs to be right so that the boat takes the skids ok when recovering on the beach.
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